Rumble Eggs
Beat up three eggs with two ounces fresh butter or well washed salt butter. Add a teaspoonful cream or new milk. Put all in a saucepan and stir over the fire five minutes. When it rises up, dish it immediately on toast.--Mrs. S.
A very rich scramble in the old English style: more butter than most modern cooks would use, and a single teaspoon of cream rather than a splash. It works, provided the heat stays low.
- The hinge: low heat, and stop earlyFive minutes for three eggs only makes sense over gentle heat with constant stirring. Pull the pan when the curds are still glossy and slightly loose, since the residual heat in that much butter will finish them on the plate.
- Two ounces of butterThat is 4 tablespoons (half a stick) for three eggs, which by modern proportion is enormous. The result is closer to a loose butter custard than a diner scramble; 1 to 2 tablespoons gives a more familiar texture if you want one.
- Well washed salt butterNineteenth-century butter was salted for keeping, often heavily and unevenly. Washing it in cold water drew out the excess brine. With modern butter, use unsalted and season the eggs yourself.
- New milkMilk fresh from the cow, unskimmed and unpasteurised. Whole milk or a little cream is the equivalent, and one teaspoon is all the recipe wants.
- When it rises upThe eggs swell and thicken suddenly as the proteins set. That moment is the cue to dish them, not a stage to cook past.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified; note that one of the two butter options is fresh and the other is washed to draw the salt out, so seasoning was evidently left to the cook. Season lightly at the end, after the curds have formed, so the eggs do not weep.
- Yield and servingThree eggs feeds one generously or two modestly. Have the toast made and warm before the eggs go in the pan, since the dish will not wait.
"Rumbled" eggs is an older English name for what we now call scrambled: the verb described tumbling or stirring the eggs about in the pan. The heavy hand with butter belongs to that same tradition, where eggs were treated as something to be enriched rather than merely cooked. That the recipe bothers to specify "fresh butter or well washed salt butter" and "new milk" says a good deal about the period's larder, in which most butter arrived salted for storage and milk was described by how recently it had left the cow. Like much of Housekeeping in Old Virginia (usually dated 1878, though some printings give 1879), the entry is signed with an initial rather than a full name, the book being a compilation of contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers.