Home › The Principles of Cookery › Minced Eggs
Minced Eggs
Boil five eggs hard and cool them in water; remove the shells and chop the eggs; boil half a pint of new milk, add three-quarters of an ounce of flour and one ounce of butter mixed together; chop up and add half an ounce of parsley, season with salt and pepper; boil for five minutes, then add the eggs, and shake well together until the whole is thoroughly heated. Do not stir it, and garnish with toasted sippets and lemon. This dish is a great favourite on the tables of vegetarians.
A late-Victorian egg supper dish: hard-boiled eggs folded into a thick parsley white sauce. The whole thing takes under twenty minutes, and the only real skill is keeping the eggs in pieces rather than mashing them.
- Don't stir — shakeThe instruction to shake the pan rather than stir is the hinge of the dish. Chopped hard-boiled egg breaks down into paste the moment a spoon works through it; a rolling motion of the pan coats the pieces and keeps them distinct.
- The measuresThis is a British book, so half a pint is 10 fl oz (about 1 1/4 US cups). Three-quarters of an ounce of flour is roughly 2 1/2 tablespoons, and an ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons — slightly more butter than flour by weight, where a classic beurre manie is equal parts, and enough flour for a sauce thick enough to cling.
- Beurre manié, not a rouxThe butter and flour are "mixed together" raw and dropped into boiling milk, rather than cooked first. Work them to a smooth paste and add in small pieces, whisking, or you will get lumps. The five minutes of boiling is what cooks out the raw flour taste, so don't cut it short.
- New milk"New milk" means fresh whole milk straight from the dairy, as opposed to skimmed or the previous day's. Whole milk is the modern equivalent; skim will give a thin, chalky sauce at this ratio.
- EggsBoil about 9-10 minutes and cool in water immediately — the cold water is what stops the grey-green ring at the yolk and makes the shells release. Chop coarsely; anything finer disappears into the sauce.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toast or fried bread, set point-up around the edge of the dish. Cut them from a firm white loaf and add them at the last moment so they stay crisp.
- YieldFive eggs and half a pint of sauce serves two generously as a supper dish, or three or four as a first course.
Cassell's closing line — that the dish is "a great favourite on the tables of vegetarians" — suggests a period. Organised vegetarianism in Britain grew from the Vegetarian Society founded at Ramsgate in 1847, and by the last quarter of the century meatless cookery had enough of a public profile that a general household dictionary felt obliged to note which of its recipes suited it. Eggs in white sauce seem to have been a mainstay of that cookery: cheap, filling, and offering the protein and richness a Victorian cook associated with meat. The technique itself is much older, a plain béchamel of the kind French cooking had standardised and English kitchens had absorbed wholesale, here dressed up only with parsley, lemon and toasted sippets — the same fried or toasted bread garnish that had been ringing English dishes since the sixteenth century.