Egg Pie
Take six hard-boiled eggs, slice, season with salt, pepper, and butter, bake in a paste, top and bottom.
Three lines of instruction and no measurements beyond the eggs, which is typical of this book's shorthand for dishes every cook already knew. The gaps worth filling are the pastry, the oven, and the fact that hard eggs and butter alone will bake dry.
- "A paste, top and bottom"The book does not say which paste. A plain shortcrust works: about 2 cups flour to 2/3 cup fat and enough ice water to bring it together, divided for a lined and covered 8- or 9-inch plate. Lard, common in nineteenth-century Southern kitchens, gives a flakier result than butter here.
- OvenThe original says only "bake." Give it 400F for 15 minutes to set and colour the bottom crust, then 350F for another 20 to 25 minutes until the top is golden. The filling is already cooked, so you are baking pastry and nothing else.
- Season generouslySix eggs need roughly a teaspoon of salt and a good half-teaspoon of pepper spread across the layers, plus 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter dotted over. Under-seasoned, this is very bland indeed.
- Add liquidSliced hard eggs and butter give off almost no moisture. The original calls for none, but four or five tablespoons of cream, milk or leftover gravy poured over before the lid goes on keeps it from eating like chalk.
- SlicingCut the eggs crosswise into rounds about a quarter-inch thick and lay them in overlapping layers rather than heaping them. An egg slicer or a wet knife stops the yolks crumbling away.
- Vent the topCut two or three slits in the lid. Steam from the cream has nowhere to go otherwise and will lift the crust off the filling.
- Yield and servingServes four as a light main or six cut small. It is best warm rather than hot.
Egg pie of this kind belongs to a long line of English "egg" and "herb" pies built on hard-boiled eggs in pastry, a way of turning a glut of eggs into something substantial without meat, and it was often useful on meatless days, though eggs themselves were restricted rather than freely permitted under strict Lenten practice. Marion Cabell Tyree's Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) is a compilation of contributions from Virginia housewives, which may explain the telegraphic style here: one imagines the recipe set down as a reminder rather than a set of instructions, on the assumption that any reader already had a pastry she used for everything. On a farm where hens laid hard in spring and eggs could not be kept long, a dish like this was less a delicacy than good management. The name "egg pie" has also long been attached to custard pies, which are a different thing altogether.