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Eggs, Scrambled
This dish differs very little in its mode of preparation from "jumbled" eggs. When the pan has been well oiled with good butter, put into it as many eggs as it will hold separately, that each yolk may be entire. When the whites have become slightly hard, stir from the bottom of the pan till done, adding a piece of butter, pepper, and salt. When done, the yolks and whites should not be blended, but appear as separate streaks stirred together. Serve on hot buttered toast with anchovy sauce, potted meat, cheese, or fish spread over it first. The eggs should be of the consistency of butter. Time, five minutes.
A late-Victorian scramble aimed at a marbled result rather than a uniform yellow curd — the streaks are the point, and most of the technique follows from that.
- The hinge: don't break the yolks earlyThe eggs go into the pan whole and unbeaten, and are only stirred once the whites have begun to set. Break or whisk them at the start and you get an ordinary homogeneous scramble instead of the streaked effect described.
- Heat and timingFive minutes is realistic only over low to moderate heat; on a modern gas burner or induction hob at full power the whites will set hard and squeak before the yolks move at all. Keep the pan below the point where butter browns.
- "Oiled with good butter"This means well greased, not cooked in oil. A generous film of butter over the whole pan surface, with a further knob stirred in at the end for richness.
- "Jumbled eggs"A related preparation named elsewhere in the book; this entry says only that scrambled eggs differ from it 'very little' in mode of preparation, and does not spell out the difference. The wording shows the compiler treated them as two distinct but closely related dishes.
- "Consistency of butter"Soft, glossy and just holding together — pull the pan off the heat while it still looks slightly underdone, since residual heat carries it further. Note this is a deliberately soft set, so use good fresh eggs.
- How many eggs"As many as it will hold separately" is governed by pan size: enough that each egg sits clear of its neighbours. Crowding them means they touch and blend, which defeats the streaking.
- The spreadsAnchovy sauce in this period usually meant a bottled essence or a made sauce flavoured with it rather than the modern pounded fillet paste, though anchovy paste works. Potted meat means the sealed-under-butter kind; a firm grated cheese or flaked smoked fish serves the same purpose.
- YieldFour to six eggs on toast feeds two as a breakfast or supper dish.
Scrambled eggs on toast under an assertive savoury spread belongs to the Victorian breakfast sideboard and to the tail end of dinner, where anchovy, potted meat and cheese were the standard vocabulary of the *savoury* course served after the sweet. Cassell's *New Dictionary of Cookery* is arranged alphabetically as a reference book rather than a menu, and it distinguishes "scrambled" from "jumbled" eggs — two versions of the same pan of eggs, the entry itself noting only that they differ very little in preparation. The insistence on visible streaks of white and yolk suggests a period taste for eggs that still looked like eggs; the uniformly pale, closely curded scramble now associated with restaurant cooking is generally taken to be a later preference. Anchovy essence, sold bottled by firms such as Burgess and Crosse & Blackwell, was a common store-cupboard flavouring of the era, and appears widely in British cookery wherever a dish needed salt and depth without meat stock.