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To make a Fast day's dish
Boil eggs very hard, and cut a little from the thick ends. Fry them in a pan, and take care to keep them continually in motion; then place them in the dish, pour over them some good fish or herb gravy, and garnish with lemon.
A meatless supper dish of hard-boiled eggs browned in fat and sauced. The original assumes you know what a fast day's gravy is, so that is the part worth spelling out.
- The hinge: keep them movingShelled hard eggs will scorch on one face and stay pale on the other the moment they sit still. Roll them constantly in the hot fat until the whole surface is an even light brown, two to three minutes, and no longer — the yolks are already cooked and further heat only makes them chalky.
- Why cut the thick endSlicing a thin disc from the broad end most likely gives each egg a flat base so it stands upright in the dish; the receipt does not say why. Either way it is a matter of presentation rather than cooking, and would be done after peeling and before frying.
- "Very hard"Twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water so the shells release cleanly. Older instructions often meant longer, which is what produces the grey-green ring at the yolk — no benefit here.
- The fatA shallow depth of clarified butter or a neutral oil, hot enough that the egg sizzles on contact. On a fast day butter was the usual choice where the household's rule allowed dairy; lard would defeat the purpose.
- Fish gravyNot a modern fish stock reduced to nothing, but a light savoury sauce built on fish broth or the liquor from cooked fish, thickened with a little flour and butter and seasoned with anchovy. Half a cup per two eggs is ample.
- Herb gravyThe meatless alternative: onion, parsley, thyme and a bay leaf simmered in water or vegetable broth, strained, then thickened. Such herb gravies rely on the herbs and a squeeze of lemon rather than on stock depth.
- YieldTwo eggs a head as a light main course, one as a first course. The dish is best assembled and served immediately — the eggs firm up and the coating softens if they sit in the sauce.
Fast days structured the cooking year in Britain and Europe long after the Reformation: Lent, Fridays, Ember days and the vigils of certain feasts all called for abstinence from butcher's meat, and receipt books answered with whole chapters of "fast day" dishes built on fish, eggs, dairy and vegetables. Eggs were the contested item — medieval Lenten rules generally excluded them along with meat and dairy, which is part of the traditional explanation for why they accumulated at Shrovetide and were used up in pancakes — but by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries English households commonly treated eggs and butter as permissible on ordinary fast days and reserved stricter fasting for Good Friday. What this short receipt really shows is how a cook made a plain hard-boiled egg look like a dinner course: browned for colour, stood upright in the dish, sauced with a gravy that carried the savour of fish or herbs where meat gravy would ordinarily have gone, and finished with lemon for the sharpness the sauce lacked.