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Eggs in Marinade
6 eggs 1 pint of vinegar ½ teaspoonful of salt 24 whole cloves ½ teaspoonful of ground mustard ½ teaspoonful of pepper Boil the eggs fifteen minutes. Take off the shells and stick four cloves into each egg. Put the vinegar on to boil. Rub the mustard, salt and pepper, with a little cold vinegar, to a smooth paste, and add to the vinegar when boiling. Stir over the fire one minute. Put the eggs in a glass fruit jar, pour over them the boiling vinegar, cover, and let stand two weeks. steak.
These are nice to serve as an accompaniment to broiled
This is a pickled-egg recipe, and the pickling instruction is the part that has not survived modern food safety review. The notes below explain the old terms and then why the method itself is the problem.
- Why this one failsWhole hard-boiled eggs are a low-acid, high-protein food. Left two weeks at room temperature in a jar, the vinegar penetrates the outside of the white slowly and unevenly, and the yolk can remain well above the pH at which Clostridium botulinum is inhibited. Botulism from home-pickled eggs held at ambient temperature is documented, not theoretical.
- The cloves make it worseSticking four cloves into each egg punctures the white and carries spice into the interior, the least acidic and most oxygen-poor part of the egg. That is the environment botulinum toxin forms in. Current guidance is that pickled eggs be refrigerated throughout, and the documented botulism case from home-pickled eggs involved eggs that had been punctured before pickling.
- Unmeasured acidityThe recipe names no acid strength. Nineteenth-century household vinegar varied widely, and the pint is diluted further by the water the eggs carry out of the pot. Nothing here establishes that the finished brine reaches a safe pH, and there is no way to infer it from the text. If you want pickled eggs, use a current tested recipe with a stated vinegar strength and refrigerated storage.
- A pint of vinegarTwo cups. The recipe does not say what size jar; a pint is only just enough to cover six shelled eggs, which is part of why the brine ends up diluted.
- "Glass fruit jar"A canning jar, in the period sense of a jar with a screw band or bail closure used for preserves. The recipe never heat-processes it; the boiling vinegar is the only heat the jar receives.
- Fifteen minutes for the eggsEven setting the pickling aside, a quarter-hour boil pushes hard-cooked eggs well past done: the yolk turns chalky and picks up the grey-green iron sulphide ring at the edge. Twelve minutes off the heat in covered water is nearer the mark for eating.
- Ground mustardDry mustard powder, not prepared mustard. Slaking it in cold vinegar before it meets the hot brine, as directed, is sound technique and keeps it from going grainy.
- YieldSix eggs, offered as a relish beside broiled steak rather than as a dish in itself.
Pickled eggs belong to the same nineteenth-century household logic as pickled walnuts, mushroom catsup and spiced beetroot: a sharp, vinegary something kept in a jar on the shelf to cut through plain broiled or roasted meat. Studding food with whole cloves was a long-standing dressing habit — the same gesture that decorates a baked ham or an onion for a bread sauce. Vinegar was widely relied on in this period as a preservative; the understanding that acidity has to be measured, and that a dense protein like an egg yolk may never reach the pH of the liquid around it, came considerably later.