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Small Salad
Cut the eggs in halves and remove the yolks; pound these with the butter and tarragon. Fill the whites with the mixture; garnish with the pieces of beetroot, and arrange on a dish with the small salad round.
A stuffed-egg savoury written in the shorthand of a cookery-school notebook: the ingredient list has been left behind, so the quantities have to be reasoned out from the method.
- "Small salad" is the salad, not a small portionIn Victorian usage small salad means the seedling greens — mustard and cress, sometimes with young radish or turnip leaves — cut at the two-leaf stage. A punnet of mustard and cress, or any fine microgreen, is the correct substitute; a bowl of leaf lettuce is not.
- The eggs are hard-boiledThe original takes this as read. Eight to ten minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives a set yolk without the grey ring that spoils the colour of the filling.
- Working quantitiesFor six eggs, allow about 1½ oz (40 g) softened butter and 1 to 2 teaspoons of finely chopped fresh tarragon, with salt and a little cayenne. Season assertively — cold butter-and-yolk mixtures taste flat straight from the mortar.
- PoundingA mortar was the period tool and it still gives the smoothest result, but pushing the yolks through a fine sieve and beating in the butter is quicker and less likely to turn the mixture oily. A food processor is awkward for a quantity this small.
- The tarragonFrench tarragon, not Russian, which is coarse and nearly flavourless. Dried tarragon at a third of the quantity will do if the herb is steeped in the softened butter for an hour first.
- The beetrootCooked, not raw, and cut into neat small dice or tiny rounds. If using vinegar-packed beetroot, blot it dry or the juice will bleed pink into the filling.
- PipingThe filling holds a shape well. A star tube gives a cleaner finish than a spoon and keeps the whites from tearing.
- Yield and serviceSix eggs make twelve halves, enough for four to six as a savoury or first course. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep cold; the whites weep if they stand.
The savoury was a fixture of the late Victorian and Edwardian dinner, a small, sharp, usually cold mouthful served after the sweet and before the dessert fruit — a British habit, where French practice ended with the sweet. Stuffed eggs suited the slot exactly: cold, savoury, quick to assemble from things already in the larder, and easy to make look deliberate with a little beetroot and a fringe of green. The "small salad" of the title is the older kitchen-garden term for mustard, cress and other seedlings cut within days of sowing. Mustard and cress was cheap, fast and reliably available in winter, which is why it turns up as garnish on so much cold work of this period. The instructions are clipped and ingredient-free, the list standing at the head of the page rather than within the method.