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Eggs with Minced Meat
(Mrs. Lincoln) Chop one pint of cold chicken, ham or veal fine and rub it to a smooth paste; add one tablespoonful of melted butter, one tablespoonful of chopped parsley, salt and pepper to taste, and two beaten eggs. If too dry, moisten with a little cream or stock, but do not have it too soft to shape. Heat it in a frying pan just enough to warm through, letting it dry off if too moist. Form it on a hot platter into a flat mound, hollow the centre leaving a ridge of the mixture around the edge. Put three or four poached eggs in the centre. Garnish with triangles of toast, laid around the base of the meat, and place around hard boiled eggs cut in halves. Garnish with parsley.
A cold-meat dish built for a hot kitchen: nothing roasts, nothing bakes, and the only real cooking is a few minutes at the stove. The success of it rests on the texture of the meat paste.
- A pint of chopped meatMeasured after chopping, a pint is 2 cups, or roughly 12 oz to 1 lb of cooked chicken, ham or veal off the bone. Leftover roast or poached breast both work; ham should be tasted before any salt is added.
- "Rub it to a smooth paste"This meant a mortar or a wooden spoon against the side of a bowl. A food processor does it in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, or the mixture turns gluey and packs into a dense mound instead of a tender one.
- The binding eggs need real heatTwo beaten eggs are worked through raw and the pan stage is described only as warming through. Cook the mixture until it is set and steaming all the way to the middle, around 160F, stirring so it dries rather than scrambles. It should hold a shape when pushed with a spoon.
- MoisteningAdd cream or stock a tablespoon at a time. The test is the shaping: it must stand as a ridged mound on the platter without slumping, so err dry.
- ShapingWork fast and on a genuinely hot platter, since the mound cools quickly. A ring mould or a bowl pressed into the centre gives a cleaner well than working freehand.
- Poaching the eggsThree or four eggs, poached soft so the yolks run into the meat when cut. Poach them while the meat is in the pan and lift them onto paper towel for a moment; wet eggs will loosen the mound.
- YieldServes three to four as a lunch or supper dish. The toast triangles and halved hard-boiled eggs are structural as much as decorative, giving each portion something to eat the paste with.
The attribution is to Mary Johnson Bailey Lincoln, principal of the Boston Cooking School in its early years and author of Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook Book (1884), the volume Fannie Farmer later revised and largely eclipsed. Dishes like this one belong to a whole genre of nineteenth-century American cookery devoted to yesterday's roast: cold meat pounded smooth, bound with egg, and rebuilt into something presentable at table. Its place in a collection of hot weather dishes is practical rather than culinary. In a house with a coal or wood range, summer cooking meant keeping the fire small and brief, so a supper that used meat already cooked, needed one frying pan and one pot of poaching water, and arrived at the table looking composed was worth having on hand.