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Garnish, Eggs For
Take six hard-boiled yolks, pound them, season with pepper and salt, and mix in three raw yolks. Mix well together, and roll into cigar-like shapes pointed at each end. Flour them well, and throw into boiling water for three or four minutes. These make a good garnish for salads and other vegetable dishes. If desired they can be flavoured with chopped parsley and savoury herbs. Probable cost, 1s.
A Victorian garnish of pounded yolks bound with raw yolk and poached — in effect a small egg quenelle. It stands or falls on the water temperature.
- The hinge: barely simmering waterThe hinge: water temperature -- The recipe says boiling water, but a hard rolling boil risks fraying the shapes before the raw yolk sets. Bring the pan to the boil, then slacken the heat so the surface only shivers, and poach three to four minutes until firm to the touch.
- Pounding without a mortarPush the six hard-boiled yolks through a fine sieve rather than using a processor, which turns them pasty and greasy. Sieved yolk stays light and takes the raw yolk more evenly.
- Getting the mixture to holdThree raw yolks to six cooked is a wet mixture by modern eyes; work in the raw yolk a little at a time and stop when it just coheres. If it will not hold a shape, a teaspoon of fine dry breadcrumbs firms it without changing the flavour.
- Flouring"Flour them well" reads as structural rather than cosmetic: the coating helps keep the surface intact in the water. Roll each shape, then roll it again just before it goes in the pan.
- Size and yieldNine yolks in total should give roughly a dozen or so shapes about the length of a thumb; the recipe itself gives no yield.
- Probable cost, 1sA shilling was not a trivial sum for a garnish; the book attaches a probable cost to its dishes, which would let a cook weigh one against a household budget.
- ServingLift them out with a slotted spoon, drain on a cloth and use warm or at room temperature. They go rubbery if refrigerated and reheated, so make them on the day.
- The herb versionChopped parsley and a little thyme or chervil, added to the cooked yolks before the raw yolk goes in, is the better of the two. Keep the herbs very finely chopped or they weaken the shape along their length.
This belongs to the long nineteenth-century tradition of the composed garnish, in which the border of a dish was built rather than scattered — aspic croutons, piped butter, forcemeat quenelles, and here a yolk paste shaped to imitate a small cigar. It may also reflect a kitchen that separated eggs constantly for custards, mayonnaise and glazes and needed uses for leftover yolks, a thrift that reads as decorative flourish but began as economy.