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Eggs, Puree Of
Boil seven eggs hard; take off the whites, chop them very small and put them aside. Pound the yolks in a mortar; add to them rather less than two ounces of good fresh butter, a little chopped parsley, and a seasoning of salt and pepper. Bind with the beaten yolks of three uncooked eggs, and pass the mixture through a colander into the middle of a dish. Put the minced whites into a stewpan with half a pint of gravy, and stir till thickish, then pour it round the yolks, and garnish with sippets of bread, which should be brushed over with egg. Brown slightly, either in a Dutch oven or before the fire, and serve hot. Time, ten minutes to boil the eggs. Sufficient for three persons.
A late-Victorian egg supper dish: sieved yolk paste in the centre, minced whites in thickened gravy around it. Two words in the text mean something different now, and one of them will send you looking for the wrong pan.
- "Dutch oven" is not a casseroleIn this book a Dutch oven is a hinged tin reflector set on the hearth to bake or brown food by radiant heat from an open fire. The modern equivalent is a grill or broiler element, with the dish placed low enough that the surface colours without the gravy boiling away.
- Pass through a sieve, not a colanderColander, sieve or strainer -- The original says colander, and coarse holes do give the thread-like strands the dish depends on; a fine drum sieve or wire-mesh strainer, with the paste pushed through by a plastic scraper, gives a finer version of the same effect, mounded in the middle of the dish.
- Half a pint of gravyImperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. "Gravy" here means good brown meat stock or a light espagnole, not thickened pan drippings; if your stock is thin, thicken it with a little beurre manie before the whites go in.
- Butter and eggs"Rather less than two ounces" of butter is about 3 tablespoons, at room temperature so it creams into the warm yolks. The three raw yolks are a binder rather than a sauce, but the assembled dish should be heated through until it is hot right to the centre, not merely tinted on top.
- Boiling the eggsTen minutes at a bare simmer is right for firm yolks; drop them straight into cold water afterwards so the shells release and the yolks stay yellow rather than going grey at the edge.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of stale bread, here brushed with beaten egg so they gild under the heat. Cut them thin, arrange them only just before browning, and they stay crisp against the gravy.
- SeasoningSieved yolk with butter is bland and absorbs a surprising amount of salt. Season the paste before you bind it, and taste the gravy separately, since it carries most of the flavour of the finished plate.
- YieldThe original says three persons, which is accurate for a supper or luncheon dish with bread and a salad. As a first course it will stretch to four.
"Puree" in nineteenth-century English kitchens generally meant something pounded and passed through a sieve, and it was applied to eggs, game or fish as readily as to vegetables; the word carried a mortar-and-tammy technique with it rather than a particular texture. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was compiled as an alphabetical household reference, and its long run of egg entries belongs to a period when eggs were a standard resource for a meatless supper or a way of filling out a table without butcher's meat. The construction here, a sieved centre ringed with a sauce and edged with gilded sippets, echoes French service, where fried or glazed bread croutes were a common finish to a soft dish that would otherwise look shapeless on the plate. The option of a hearth-side reflector oven for the final browning suggests a kitchen where the closed range could not be assumed: the instruction reads "either in a Dutch oven or before the fire."