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Eggs, Stuffed
Cut four hard-boiled eggs into halves lengthwise; take out the yolks and pound them with two ounces of butter, one ounce of chopped ham, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, and a little pepper and salt. Refill the eggs with this mixture, sprinkle over with a few bread-crumbs and specks of butter, and brown in a quick oven. Serve very hot. Probable cost, 10d.
A straightforward stuffed-egg dish that differs from the modern cold devilled egg chiefly in being baked and served hot. A few Victorian conventions need translating.
- Quick ovenRead this as a hot oven, roughly 400-450F (200-230C). The eggs only need to be in long enough for the crumbs to colour, roughly 5-8 minutes; the whites are already cooked and will toughen if left longer.
- Butter quantityTwo ounces of butter to four egg yolks makes a very rich, soft filling by modern taste. An ounce is plenty if you want the mixture firm enough to mound and hold its shape under the crumbs.
- Chopped hamAn ounce is about two tablespoons finely minced. The ham a Victorian kitchen had to hand would most often have been cooked, cured ham, likely off a boiled joint; supermarket sliced ham works, but a dry-cured ham gives the salt and depth the recipe assumes. Season at the end, after tasting.
- Pound themThe original expects a mortar. A fork pressed against the bowl or a small sieve gives a smoother result than a food processor, which turns yolk and butter greasy.
- Keeping them uprightHalved eggs roll. Cut a sliver from the base of each white, or bed them in a dish of coarse salt or crumpled foil so the filling stays put in the oven.
- Specks of butterDot the crumbs with butter the size of a pea each; without fat the crumbs scorch at the edges and stay pale in the middle. Dry breadcrumbs brown more evenly than fresh.
- YieldEight halves, enough as a savoury or light first course for four, or two as a supper dish with salad.
- Probable costTenpence in pre-decimal money, the sort of costing figure attached to entry after entry throughout the book.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the British egg savoury, when boiled eggs stuffed with their own pounded yolks appeared at breakfast, at supper and at the end of dinner as a savoury course. The technique itself is older than the book: recipes for eggs halved, the yolks mixed with herbs, spice and fat, and the whites refilled can be found in earlier European cookery. Comparable dishes include the American devilled egg and the French oeufs mimosa, though the latter is usually dressed and sprinkled with sieved yolk rather than stuffed. The finish here - crumbs, dotted butter and a blast of high heat - is a treatment the book applies to other cold made-up mixtures to serve them hot, and the chopped ham is the kind of thrifty use a boiled joint's trimmings would allow.