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Egg Preservative
1 pint salt. 2 pints fresh lime. 3 gallons cold water.
Mix well, giving it 2 days to dissolve, stirring often. Pour off the liquid after the lime settles. Put in the eggs without cracking shell, and keep covered with brine. If brine falls short, make more in same way and add to the eggs. Do not put the eggs in a wooden vessel. Get a stone of lime, slack with boiling water, then measure the lime for eggs. This will cover 14 dozen eggs. I have used this formula for years and my eggs are as good the next spring as when I put them away.
I always put up my eggs for the winter in May when they are cheapest. -Mrs. A. L. Hornby, Gilvert Plains, Man.
This is a pre-refrigeration egg cellar in a crock: unwashed eggs held under limewater so the alkaline solution and the calcium carbonate that forms on the shell seal the pores. It worked well enough for farm households, but it cannot be reproduced safely with today's eggs, and the lime itself is a caustic industrial material rather than a kitchen ingredient.
- "Fresh lime" is quicklime, not the fruitThe recipe means calcium oxide, which it calls "a stone of lime" (a lump, or possibly a stone weight of it), slaked with water to make calcium hydroxide. Slaking is strongly exothermic: boiling water poured on quicklime spits, steams and can reach temperatures that crack a vessel and burn skin and eyes. Calcium hydroxide is also strongly alkaline, around pH 12.4 in saturated solution.
- No step ever reaches a safe temperatureEggs go into the brine raw and come out raw, having spent up to ten months at cellar temperature. Nothing in the process kills Salmonella already inside an egg, and nothing stops it multiplying over that span.
- Modern eggs are the wrong eggs for itThe method depends on an intact natural cuticle on an unwashed, freshly laid shell. Commercially graded eggs are washed and sanitized, which strips that layer, and they are then refrigerated -- an egg brought out of refrigeration into a warm crock sweats, which draws bacteria inward rather than sealing them out.
- There is no way to check the resultA limewater egg develops a chalky deposit that makes candling or inspection through the shell difficult. The original's confidence -- "as good the next spring" -- rests on nothing more than the absence of visible spoilage, which is not a test for pathogens.
- Alkali and shell chemistryShell chemistry -- Limed eggs are known to burst readily if boiled, because the sealed pores trap expanding air; they were pricked first. Cracked shells in a shared crock can contaminate the whole batch.
- Scale and the wooden-vessel warningThree gallons of brine over fourteen dozen eggs is a substantial standing volume of caustic liquid. The instruction to avoid wood is sound as far as it goes: lime water attacks it and wood is hard to keep clean.
- If you want stored eggsUse a current, tested method with defined temperatures and holding times. Refrigeration at or below 4C is the ordinary answer, and freezing beaten eggs is the traditional one that still passes muster.
Before rural refrigeration, hens laid heavily in spring and almost nothing in the dark of winter, so eggs were cheap in May and scarce and dear by January -- exactly the arbitrage Mrs. Hornby describes. Two preservatives dominated the household literature of the period: limewater, as here, and sodium silicate, sold as water glass, which was heavily promoted as cleaner to handle and as leaving the shells less chalky. Both worked by plugging the shell's pores against air and microbes. The entry is also a good sample of how the Five Roses Cook Book was assembled: Lake of the Woods Milling Company solicited contributions from housewives across Canada and printed them with name and town attached, so the book preserves the practical economy of prairie farm households -- Gilbert Plains, Manitoba, in this case -- alongside its baking.