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Eggs, Potted
Pound the hard-boiled yolks of twelve eggs with anchovy sauce. Mix them to a paste with two ounces of good fresh butter, and season with two tea-spoonfuls of salt and one of white pepper. Have ready some small pots, and chop the whites of the eggs very small. As the pots are being filled with the paste, strew in the chopped whites, and cover over the tops with clarified butter. These eggs will not keep long. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. for this quantity.
A Victorian potted savoury: hard yolks worked to a paste with anchovy and butter, flecked with chopped white and sealed under butter. It reads as a preserve but the book is honest that it is not one.
- Season by taste, not by the figuresTwo teaspoonfuls of salt on top of anchovy sauce will be inedibly salty to a modern palate. Add a pinch at a time and taste; the anchovy is doing most of the work.
- Anchovy sauceThis means the bottled Victorian condiment, thin and sharp, not a modern fish sauce. Anchovy paste or Gentleman's Relish is the closest thing on a shelf today; start with about two teaspoons for twelve yolks and work up.
- The quantity is genuinely unstatedNo measure is given for the anchovy sauce, and the original assumed you knew your own bottle. Add it a spoonful at a time until the yolks come together as a paste.
- ButterTwo ounces (about 55 g) is a stiff ratio for twelve yolks. Soften it fully and expect to add another ounce or so if you want something spreadable rather than crumbly.
- PoundingA mortar gives the smoothest result, but pressing the yolks through a fine sieve first and then beating in the butter is faster and avoids the greasy, over-worked texture a food processor produces.
- Clarified butterMelt butter gently, let the milk solids settle, and pour off the clear fat. It sets as a lid that keeps air off the surface; the milky residue is what would sour first.
- KeepingTake the book at its word. The butter seal slows oxidation but does nothing against bacteria in a cooked egg paste, so refrigerate the pots and eat them within two or three days.
- Yield and servingTwelve yolks make roughly a cup of paste, enough for four small ramekins. Serve as a breakfast or supper relish on hot toast, or thinned slightly for sandwiches.
- CostOne shilling and sixpence was the price of the ingredients when the book was compiled, quoted so a cook could compare dishes; it carries no useful modern equivalent.
Potting was the English larder technique before canning: cooked meat, fish, cheese or, as here, egg pounded fine, packed tight to exclude air and sealed under a layer of clarified butter. It gave breakfast and supper tables a ready savoury spread, and by the mid-nineteenth century potted ham, shrimps and anchovy were sold commercially as well as made at home. Anchovy sauce turns up repeatedly in books of this period as a way to give a mild ingredient a salty, savoury edge. The candid line that "these eggs will not keep long" is worth noticing: the compiler knew that egg does not pot like potted beef, and said so rather than pretending otherwise.