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Nuremberg Egg
Put an egg in boiling water, and let it simmer gently for ten minutes. Take it out, shell it, and dip it in batter. Fry it in hot butter until it is browned all over, then dip it in the batter again, and repeat this until the ball is the desired size. Serve on a hot dish, and pour wine-sauce over it. Time, according to size.
A hard-boiled egg built up into a ball by repeated dipping and frying — closer to a fritter than to an egg dish. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the batter setting firmly between coats.
- The hinge: let each coat setDip, fry until the surface is firm and coloured, then let the ball cool for a minute or two before the next dip. Batter applied to a hot, greasy coat slides off, and you end up with one thick soggy shell instead of several crisp layers. Three or four coats is plenty; the original's "desired size" was a matter of showmanship.
- Butter will burnBatter needs fat hot enough to set and colour it quickly, and whole butter darkens and scorches before it gets there. Use clarified butter or ghee, or a neutral oil with a spoonful of butter for flavour.
- Ten minutes is right for onceA ten-minute simmer gives a fully set yolk, which is what you want here — a soft centre would weep into the batter. Cool the egg in cold water before shelling so the coats do not steam themselves off from within.
- The batterNo batter is given here; a plain coating batter of flour, salt, egg and enough milk or milk-and-water to make it cling to a spoon is what the instruction assumes. A stiffer batter than you would use for pancakes holds the ball's shape better.
- Wine-sauce means a sweet sauceIn Victorian English books wine sauce is usually a sweetened sauce built on sherry, madeira or a light wine, thickened with butter and flour or with yolk, and sometimes flavoured with lemon peel or nutmeg. That suggests the dish was meant as a sweet rather than a savoury, though the recipe itself does not say.
- Depth of fatShallow frying makes the ball flatten on one side. Use enough fat to float it, or turn it constantly with two spoons so no single face sits on the pan.
- YieldOne egg per person, served hot the moment the last coat comes out of the fat. It does not hold, and it does not reheat.
The egg-in-a-shell-of-fritter idea belongs to a long European tradition of disguised food -- a small thing built into a large one for the pleasure of the reveal at the table. Coated, fried hard-boiled eggs served with sweet sauces are known in German-speaking cookery, which may be how a south German city's name became attached, though the connection is guesswork. Nuremberg was known to English readers of the period chiefly for its gingerbread, its toys and its clockmaking -- early portable clocks are traditionally said to have been nicknamed "Nuremberg eggs," though that nickname is itself of uncertain origin -- so the name carried a general sense of ingenious craftsmanship; whether the dish was ever actually made there is not documented. What it does tell you plainly is that a Victorian kitchen could treat a single egg as the basis of a whole sweet course, and that frying batter was expected to be a skill rather than a shortcut.