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Eggs, Steamed
Break half a dozen eggs into separate cups, and have ready a well-buttered dish, into which each egg should be placed carefully. Cover the dish to prevent the heat from escaping, and set it over a pan of boiling water, first putting small bits of butter lightly over the top of the eggs. When they are set sufficiently, sprinkle them with a little salt, and serve with fried ham or sausages. Time, about four minutes to set.
This is a double-boiler egg dish — closer to modern shirred or coddled eggs than to anything scrambled. The whole technique rests on keeping the heat gentle and trapped.
- The hinge: never let the dish touch the waterThe buttered dish sits over a pan of boiling water, not in it. Direct contact, or a hard rolling boil that splashes, will toughen the whites into rubber before the yolks warm through.
- Break each egg into a cup firstNot fussiness — it lets you slide each yolk into the buttered dish unbroken and catch a bad egg before it joins the others. Any small ramekin or teacup works.
- The right vesselA shallow heatproof dish or metal gratin pan wide enough to hold six eggs in one layer, set over a saucepan of simmering water. A wide skillet with an inch of water and a plate resting on a ring inside it does the same job.
- Cover it, and mean itThe lid is what cooks the tops of the eggs. Without trapped steam the whites over the yolks are slow to lose their clear, slimy look. A plate or a sheet of foil will do if the dish has no lid.
- About the four minutesFour minutes is likely to give barely-set whites and liquid yolks. A heavier pottery dish, or eggs cold from the refrigerator, will take appreciably longer. Judge by sight: the white opaque, the yolk still glossy.
- Salt at the end, as writtenThe instruction sprinkles salt only once the eggs are set; salting raw whites is commonly said to mottle the surface.
- YieldSix eggs serves three as a breakfast dish, or six alongside a substantial plate of fried ham or sausage.
- Soft yolksThe yolks here are not brought to a temperature that pasteurises them. Anyone cooking for someone pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised should use pasteurised eggs or cook further.
Steaming eggs over water is among the gentler standard Victorian egg treatments, sitting between boiling in the shell and frying in fat. The method works on the same principle as the French oeufs en cocotte and the nursery "coddled egg": indirect heat, so the albumen never reaches the temperature at which it turns leathery. In a coal-range kitchen a pan of boiling water would often already be going for something else, and eggs could be set over it without a burner of their own. The pairing with fried ham or sausage points to a breakfast or supper dish of the later nineteenth-century middle-class table, where the cooked breakfast had become a settled institution.