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Egg Cups--A Breakfast Dish
Boil some eggs perfectly hard. Halve them, take out the yolks, which mix smoothly with some finely chopped or ground ham or fowl, salt and pepper, and a few spoonfuls melted butter or salad oil. Cut a piece off the bottom of each white half, to make them stand, and fill each with a chopped mixture. Make a sauce of sweet cream, boiled within an inner saucepan, and pour over the eggs. Decorate the edges of the dish with sprigs of curled parsley.--Mrs. A. M. D.
A straightforward stuffed-egg dish; the only technical step is the cream sauce, which the original expects you to hold together over water rather than direct heat.
- "Boil perfectly hard"Twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives firm yolks without the grey-green ring and makes the shells peel cleanly. Older eggs peel more easily than very fresh ones.
- Inner saucepanThis is a double boiler or bain-marie: a bowl or pan set over simmering water, not in it. Cream heated directly will scorch and may break; over water it thickens gently to a coating consistency.
- The sauce is thin by designThe recipe adds no thickener, so plain sweet cream heated over water will be a pouring sauce, not a napping one. Cream reduces only slowly over a water bath, but reducing it further is closer to the original than adding flour, which changes the character of the dish.
- Ham or fowlThe recipe gives no quantities; as a working proportion, about 3 oz of finely minced cooked ham or leftover chicken to six eggs. A food processor works, but pulse it: the filling should be a paste, not a purée.
- Butter or salad oil"salad oil" in this period usually meant a mild olive oil, though cottonseed oil was increasingly sold under the same name by the 1870s. "A few spoonfuls" is generous for six yolks; start with two tablespoons and add only enough to bring the mixture together.
- Cutting the basesTrimming a sliver from the rounded end of each white so it stands is the detail that makes the dish work as written, since the sauce is poured over rather than spooned around.
- ServingSix eggs yields twelve halves, enough for four at breakfast. Assemble the eggs on a warmed dish and sauce them at the last moment; the whites go rubbery if held long in hot cream.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, is full of these initialled attributions — the book is essentially a community cookbook of the post-war Upper South, where a dish's authority came from the woman who vouched for it. Stuffed hard eggs of this kind are very old and very widespread, appearing in European cookery long before the American versions, and the technique here is the same one behind the modern deviled egg: yolks removed, seasoned, and returned to the whites. What marks this as a Victorian breakfast dish rather than a picnic one is the hot cream sauce poured over at table, along with the frugal use of chopped leftover ham or fowl — the sort of small economy that shapes a great deal of this book.