Egg Salad
Boil six eggs fifteen minutes; while they are boiling, make a French dressing and add to it one tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar, one tablespoonful of onion juice and one tablespoonful of finely chopped parsley. When the eggs are done remove the shells, cut into slices, and arrange them on a salad dish so that one overlaps the other; pour the dressing over while the eggs are still hot, stand away in a cold place for one or two hours, garnish with parsley, and serve.
A cold-supper salad that depends on dressing the eggs while they are still hot, so the vinegar and onion soak in. Two details in the original are worth changing and one is worth obeying exactly.
- Cut the boiling timeFifteen minutes gives a chalky yolk with a grey-green ring at its edge and a white that slices like an eraser. Twelve minutes at a bare simmer is the outside limit for a large egg; ten to eleven leaves the yolk set but still golden.
- Dress them hotThis is the instruction that matters. Dressing clings to and penetrates warm egg better than cold, which is why the original insists on it. Peel and slice the moment they are cool enough to handle and pour the dressing over at once.
- French dressing, period senseIn books of this period it generally means oil and vinegar beaten with salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, though some versions add mustard or paprika. About 6 tablespoons oil to 2 of vinegar suits six eggs, before the extra tarragon vinegar goes in.
- Onion juiceA seasoning that turns up often in salad recipes of the period, giving onion flavour without texture. Halve an onion and grate it on the fine side of a box grater, then press the pulp in a sieve or squeeze it in a corner of a cloth; a small onion yields a tablespoon or more.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and easy to improvise by steeping a few bruised tarragon sprigs in white wine vinegar for a week. Do not substitute dried tarragon in plain vinegar; it turns the dressing hay-flavoured.
- Slicing without wreckageA wet thin-bladed knife, wiped between cuts, or an egg slicer. Yolks that are a shade underdone will smear less if the eggs have sat five minutes in cold water before peeling.
- "A cold place"Use the refrigerator. One to two hours is the whole point of the dish, but do not leave dressed eggs out at room temperature to marinate.
- YieldSix eggs feeds four as a first course or side salad, two as a light supper with bread and butter.
In the late nineteenth century, American and British kitchens still cooked over coal ranges, and the arrival of July made a hot dinner genuinely punishing. One answer was the cold table: salads, jellies, chilled soups and made-over meats, all things that could be finished in the morning and stood away on ice. Egg salad of this type belongs to that logic — the range is lit only long enough to boil the eggs, and the dish improves while it sits. The dressing is the Anglo-American "French dressing" of the period, oil and vinegar seasoned in the bowl rather than the sweetened bottled dressing that later took the name in the United States. Onion juice and herb-flavoured vinegars were seasonings of the sort prized for giving flavour without visible pieces.