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Eggs, Ragout Of
Boil twelve eggs hard, and with a small knife carefully divide the whites lengthwise into halves, taking care to keep the yolks whole and the whites unbroken. Place the yolks and whites in nice order in a dish, the hollow parts of the whites uppermost, and fill them as high as possible with fried bread-crumbs. Now make a sauce as follows. Boil half an ounce of truffles in three or four table-spoonfuls of water, and chop them very fine with a quarter of a pint of pickled mushrooms. Mince some parsley, boil it in the water saved from the truffles, add three more table-spoonfuls of water, a gill of red wine, a spoonful of ketchup, a little grated nutmeg and mace, with a bit of butter rolled in flour; boil all together, and pour the mixture over the eggs.
A Victorian dish of hard-boiled eggs dressed in a dark, wine-and-mushroom sauce. Almost all the difficulty is in the sauce, which is written in eighteenth-century shorthand.
- Ketchup does not mean tomatoIn a book of this date "ketchup" is mushroom or walnut ketchup: a thin, dark, salty condiment closer to Worcestershire sauce than to anything in a squeeze bottle. Tomato ketchup will make the sauce sweet and cloudy; use mushroom ketchup, or a dash of Worcestershire, plus soy for depth.
- A gillA gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, five fluid ounces, or a generous half cup. The quarter-pint of pickled mushrooms is likewise a volume measure -- the same quantity again, about five fluid ounces.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre mani u00e9: equal weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste. The recipe gives no quantity, only 'a bit'. Whisk it in at the end in small pieces and simmer a minute or two to cook out the raw flour, otherwise the sauce tastes pasty.
- The truffle water is the pointThe instruction to save the water the truffles boiled in and cook the parsley in it is not fussiness; that liquor carries most of the aroma. Half an ounce of fresh truffle is an expensive proposition today, and preserved truffle in its own juice is the sensible substitute, juice and all.
- Boiling the eggsTen to twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives firm yolks without the grey-green ring that makes them look tired. Cooling completely also makes the whites firm enough to halve cleanly with a thin, wet knife.
- Fried bread-crumbsCoarse crumbs from stale bread, fried in butter until brown and crisp, not dry packaged crumbs. Fill the whites at the last possible moment and pour the sauce around rather than over them, or the crumbs collapse before the dish reaches the table.
- Serve warm, not hotNothing here is reheated after the eggs are boiled, so warm the serving dish and have the sauce at a simmer when it goes on. Cold hard-boiled egg under a hot sauce is the usual failure of this dish.
- YieldTwelve eggs, twenty-four halves plus twelve yolks, serves six as a light supper or first course.
"Ragout" comes from the French rago u00fbter, to revive the appetite, and by the eighteenth century English cookery books had thoroughly domesticated it: to "ragoo" something meant to serve it in a rich brown sauce, often built on wine, ketchup and pickled mushrooms rather than on a long-simmered stock. Recipes of exactly this shape u2014hard eggs halved, arranged, and sauced u2014appear in English household books well before Cassell's, and this version preserves their vocabulary almost unchanged, down to the butter rolled in flour and the spoonful of ketchup. It belongs to the tradition of making a formal dish out of cheap materials: a dozen eggs and a handful of preserves, lifted into company food by truffle and red wine.