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Plovers' Eggs, in Cases
Take some fireproof china cases, one for each egg, coat them round the bottom and sides with forcemeat (see POULTRY, FORCEMEAT OF), which can be made more savoury by frying a chopped mushroom or two with the herbs, and mixing them with it. Break an egg into each case, and cover with a layer of forcemeat, making it smooth with a knife. Set these in a tin of boiling water in the oven, and let them simmer till firm, which will take about fifteen minutes. Turn out on a hot dish, pour a little rich white sauce over, and sprinkle them with chopped truffle, parsley, and grated ham. Serve hot. Probable cost, 6d. to 8d. each.
The problem here is not technique but the main ingredient: the eggs of the lapwing and its relatives can no longer legally be taken or sold in Britain and across most of Europe. The rest of the page is a useful window on late-Victorian egg cookery, so the notes below explain what the instructions mean and why the dish cannot stand as written.
- The eggs are the barrier"Plovers' eggs" in this book means the eggs of the northern lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), gathered wild from spring fields and sold by the dozen to London poulterers. The lapwing is now a red-listed breeding bird in the UK, and taking its eggs is prohibited under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981; comparable protections apply to wild bird eggs across the EU and to migratory shorebirds in North America. There is no lawful supply to cook from.
- Substitution is not a small editA plover's egg is well under half the weight of a hen's egg, with a proportionally large yolk, and the fifteen-minute timing, the case size and the ratio of forcemeat to egg presumably follow from that. Anyone wanting a baked egg in forcemeat should work from a current recipe written for the egg they actually have rather than rescaling this one.
- "Fireproof china cases"These are individual ovenproof porcelain moulds — what a modern kitchen would call ramekins or dariole moulds. "Case" here means the vessel, not a pastry shell.
- Forcemeat of poultryThe cross-reference points to a pounded poultry farce of the kind usual in the period — poultry or veal flesh worked with fat, breadcrumbs and egg to bind, with chopped herbs; the exact proportions are in that entry, not this one. It is what sets around the egg during cooking, and the recipe suggests enriching it with a chopped mushroom or two fried with the herbs.
- The tin of boiling waterA bain-marie. Setting the moulds in hot water in the oven keeps the forcemeat below the temperature at which it would curdle and squeeze out its fat, and lets the egg set gently. Cassell's gives no oven heat; the water bath was expected to do the regulating.
- "Simmer till firm"The firmness meant is presumably that of the forcemeat; the book does not say how set the yolk should be after fifteen minutes in the water bath.
- The garnish and the priceChopped truffle, parsley and grated ham scattered over a rich white sauce is standard garniture of the period. The stated cost of 6d. to 8d. per egg was substantial — a luxury item served a few weeks a year.
Plovers' eggs were one of the sharpest seasonal luxuries of the Victorian and Edwardian table: gathered from lapwing nests on English and Dutch farmland in March and April, sold at high prices in London, and served cold in moss-lined baskets at club dinners and shooting lunches, or hot in elaborate preparations like this one. Their brief season and their small size made them a marker of status rather than of nourishment, and Victorian cookery dictionaries treat them as a recognised commodity with a quoted market price. Egg-collecting is likely to have contributed to the lapwing's decline, though the main driver of its continuing losses is changing farmland practice; egg-taking was progressively restricted in Britain through the twentieth century, and the dish now survives only on the page.