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Eggs, Preserved
Whatever process be adopted, the eggs should always be newly laid. A solution of gum arabic, if not too expensive, will be found to answer well. Smear the eggs thoroughly, and, when dry, cover with powdered charcoal, bran, or sawdust. They may also be preserved by plunging them in a net in boiling water for about twenty seconds, and then packing in bran, etc. To keep a longer time, make a solution of quick-lime, salt, and cream of tartar, in the proportion of three pounds of lime, one ounce of cream of tartar, and half a pound of salt, to about five or six quarts of boiling water. When quite cold, cover the eggs with the solution, and throw a thick covering over the vessel. Salt, as in all cases of food preservation, is good here. Cover the bottom of a box or barrel with salt, and lay in as many eggs as it will take without touching each other. Throw in salt, finely powdered, enough to fill up the spaces between the eggs, and to make another layer or cover. Continue to place eggs and salt alternately, and let the top be at least an inch deep of salt: press the salt down firmly, that no air shall enter to the eggs, and cover with a cloth and a tight-fitting lid. Store in a dry, cool place.
This is a set of Victorian methods for holding eggs through the winter months, and every one of them depends on conditions that no longer apply. The reasons it fails are worth understanding, but the procedures should not be followed.
- Quicklime is not a food ingredientThe "quick-lime" here is calcium oxide, which reacts violently with water and produces a strongly caustic solution capable of burning skin and eyes. Three pounds of it slaked into five or six quarts of boiling water is a serious hazard to handle in a domestic kitchen, quite apart from what it does to the egg.
- No step reaches a safe temperatureTwenty seconds in boiling water sets a thin skin of albumen just under the shell and nothing more; the interior never approaches a pasteurising temperature. Everything that was inside the egg when it was laid is still alive and now sealed in for storage.
- Salmonella changes the whole calculationSalmonella Enteritidis in laying flocks was not a recognised problem when this was written, and it is one of the reasons egg-holding practice changed. Eggs stored for weeks or months at cellar temperature give any internal contamination a long, undisturbed opportunity to multiply.
- Modern eggs have already lost their defenceCommercially washed eggs have had the natural cuticle stripped from the shell, which makes them considerably more permeable than the unwashed, newly laid eggs this method assumes. Coating or liming a washed egg does not restore that barrier.
- Salt and bran packing preserve nothingDry salt around the outside of an intact shell does not draw moisture from the contents or kill anything inside. It slows evaporation and air exchange, and that is not preservation in any modern sense, whatever the author's confidence that 'salt, as in all cases of food preservation, is good here'.
- Bran and sawdust are an added riskSawdust today may come from treated, glued or resinous timber, and loose bran is an unsterile agricultural by-product that can carry Salmonella. Neither is a suitable medium for storing food.
- If you want to keep eggsRefrigeration at or below 4C is the current answer, and freezing beaten eggs works well for baking. For long-term storage use a current, tested method rather than this one.
Before year-round laying flocks and cold chains, eggs were a sharply seasonal food: hens slowed or stopped in winter, and the glut came in spring. Households therefore "put down" eggs in autumn, and Cassell's is simply collecting the range of methods in circulation — sealing the pores with gum arabic or a brief scald, or immersing the eggs in an alkaline lime solution, a practice generally traced to the 18th and 19th centuries and usually called liming. The same logic later produced the sodium silicate or "waterglass" bucket that was standard in British and American larders well into the 1940s and reappeared during wartime shortages. What all of these share is the aim of blocking the shell's pores against air and evaporation; none of them was understood as killing anything, because the germ theory of food spoilage was only beginning to shape domestic practice when this dictionary was compiled.