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Eight Eggs (Thin slices of Gruy re Cheese)
Eight thin slices of Gruyère Cheese.
Two ounces of grated Gruyère Cheese.
Nutmeg. Mignonette Pepper.
Salt. One gill of double Cream.
A little chopped Parsley.
Spread the butter on the bottom of a dish and lay the slices of cheese on it; break the eggs upon the cheese, being careful not to disturb the yolks.
Sprinkle some grated nutmeg, mignonette pepper and salt over them; mix the chopped parsley, the cream whipped, and the grated cheese together, and pour over them; bake in a quick oven about ten minutes. Hand very thin dry toast with the eggs.
Œufs Farcis à la Russe.
Ingredients.
Six hard-boiled Eggs.
Caviare. Tomatoes. Oil. Vinegar. Cut the eggs in half, and take out some of the yolk from the centre of each half; fill this space in with caviare, and cover over with the yolk rubbed through a sieve. Serve on slices of tomato, with a little salad oil, vinegar, and pepper and salt over them.
Œufs Farcis à la Provençale.
Ingredients.
Four Eggs, hard-boiled.
Three Anchovies, boned.
One teaspoonful of Essence of Anchovy.
Watercress. Two ounces of Butter.
Lettuce. Cayenne and Salt.
Cut the eggs carefully in half, and remove the yolk without breaking the white. Pound the yolks of eggs, the anchovies, watercress, butter, anchovy-essence, cayenne, and salt; when well pounded rub through a hair-sieve. Fill in the white of egg cases neatly with this mixture, putting small handles of parsley-stalks across the tops. Dish up on shredded lettuce, and the remainder of the mixture in the centre with a little mayonnaise sauce.
Three separate savouries have been run together here: a baked egg-and-Gruyère dish, and two cold stuffed-egg preparations. The ingredient lists in the original are incomplete — the first names neither the eggs (eight, from the title) nor a quantity of butter — so read the method before shopping.
- The hinge: bake briefly and pull earlyTen minutes in a hot oven is right for set whites and liquid yolks, but the cream-and-cheese topping keeps cooking on the way to the table. Take the dish out while the whites still look barely set at the centre.
- A gillAn imperial gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, or roughly two-thirds of a US cup. Whip it to soft peaks only — stiff cream will not spread over the eggs.
- Mignonette pepperCoarsely cracked pepper, traditionally white or a white-and-black mixture, crushed rather than ground. A few turns of a coarse mill is the modern equivalent.
- A quick ovenSomewhere around 400-450F (200-230C); the old oven terms map only loosely onto modern dials. The dish wants a shallow gratin or baking dish, well buttered, wide enough that the eggs sit in one layer without crowding.
- Butter quantityNone is given for the first dish. About an ounce, softened and smeared over the base, is enough to keep the cheese slices from welding to the dish.
- Essence of anchovyA thin bottled anchovy extract, once a standard store cupboard item. Anchovy paste from a tube does the same job; use rather less, as it is more concentrated and saltier.
- Hair sieve, and poundingA fine-mesh sieve and a food processor between them replace the mortar and the horsehair sieve. Process the filling, then push it through the sieve if you want it genuinely smooth.
- YieldThe baked eggs serve four as a savoury, two as a light supper. The stuffed eggs give twelve and eight halves respectively — savoury-course portions of one or two halves a head.
Savouries were the small, sharply seasoned dishes served at the end of a formal English dinner, after the sweet and before the dessert of fruit and nuts — a course generally said to have no real counterpart in French service. The three recipes here show the range: a hot baked egg dish that is essentially œufs sur le plat enriched with Gruyère, and two cold stuffed eggs given the fashionable geographical tags of the period. À la Russe often signals caviare, which by the late nineteenth century reached London in quantity from the Caspian sturgeon fisheries, though the tag was also attached to sour cream, beetroot and to a style of service; à la Provençale here means anchovy, olive oil and salad leaves rather than the garlic and tomato the term more often implies. Anchovy essence and cayenne, in particular, are the hallmark of the English savoury: whatever the dish, it was meant to leave a salty, peppery edge on the palate to carry the drinker into the port.