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Soft-Boiled Eggs
Put the eggs in a large tin cup or any tin vessel convenient. Pour boiling water over them, and let them remain near the fire, five minutes. Do not let them boil. Eggs cooked thus are slightly jellied throughout. They can be kept hot without becoming hard.--Mrs. S. T.
This is a coddled egg rather than a boiled one: the eggs cook in water that is cooling from the boil, never in water at a rolling boil. The method survives because it gives a uniformly set, custardy white instead of the rubbery ring a hard boil produces.
- The hinge: no boilingThe water is meant to sit below a simmer while the eggs stand in it. Egg white begins to set at around 145-155F and toughens above that, so water well short of boiling sets it softly all the way through; the actual temperature inside a tin cup is not recoverable.
- "Near the fire"A nineteenth-century range offered a gradient of heat, with warm spots away from the firebox that a cook judged by hand rather than by thermometer; no fixed figure can be assigned. The modern equivalent is a covered pan on an unlit burner, or the oven at its lowest setting -- not a burner on low, which will bring the water back to a simmer.
- Water volume mattersA tin cup holding two eggs and a scant cup of water loses heat fast, and the eggs may end up barely warm. Several times the volume of water to eggs, in a heavy pan or lidded jug rather than thin tin, will hold the heat better across the five minutes.
- TimingFive minutes in cooling water may give only a loose set, particularly with cold eggs; a little longer may be needed for "slightly jellied throughout." Eggs straight from the refrigerator will want the longer time, eggs at room temperature the shorter.
- Holding them hotThe eggs will not seize the way they do in boiling water, but they go on firming as they stand, so a longer hold turns the jelly into a soft set, and long enough in hot water will cook them through.
- Raw-egg cautionAn egg cooked this way does not reach 160F throughout. Healthy adults generally accept the risk in a soft-boiled egg, but for children, pregnant women, the elderly or anyone immunocompromised, use pasteurized-in-shell eggs or cook to a firm set.
- YieldThe original gives no number. Reckon two eggs per person at breakfast, served in the shell in cups or broken into a warmed dish with salt, pepper and butter.
Coddling belongs to a period when a cook had a range with a permanent gradient of heat, from the firebox to the cool shelf at the end, and could park a vessel at a chosen temperature for as long as she liked. Soft, jellied eggs were also standard invalid cookery in the later nineteenth century, recommended in books of the period as easier to digest than fried or hard-boiled eggs, and many household manuals give a method that keeps them tender and hot indefinitely for a tray carried upstairs. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, names its contributors variously by name and by initials, and "Mrs. S. T." is one of them.