Hot Egg Salad
Into a small saucepan put 1 tablespoonful of olive oil and set over the fire. When very hot break into it 3 fresh eggs; as they begin to set stir them slightly so as to partially mix the yolks and whites and yet have them show separately.
When firm turn out on a dish, garnish with chopped pickles and a little freshly grated lemon peel and serve at once with a French dressing.
A three-egg dish that sits somewhere between scrambled eggs and a broken omelette, dressed and served warm. The whole point is the marbling, so the handling of the pan is what matters.
- Heat control"Very hot" oil in a period recipe implies a pan hot enough to set the whites on contact. On a modern burner, medium-high is enough; the eggs should sizzle at the edges but not brown, or the streaked yolk-and-white effect turns into a uniform grey-brown scramble.
- The stirringTwo or three passes with a spatula, no more. The instruction to "partially mix" is the hinge of the dish: over-stir and you have plain scrambled eggs with pickles on them.
- "When firm"Take that at its word here. The eggs should be fully set, not creamy, because they are about to be dressed with an acidic vinaigrette that would loosen soft curds into a puddle.
- French dressingIn American books of this period this means a simple oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette shaken with salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- Chopped picklesMost likely cucumber pickles in vinegar brine, chopped fine, since that was the usual default. Sweet gherkins or bread-and-butter pickles will fight the dressing; a sour dill or a cornichon suits it better.
- Lemon peelGrated zest only, no white pith. Add it after the eggs leave the pan so it stays aromatic rather than cooking down.
- YieldThree eggs serves one as a light lunch or two as a first course. It does not hold; the dressing weeps and the eggs toughen within a few minutes, which is why the original says serve at once.
Hot salads, meaning cooked ingredients dressed with vinaigrette and served warm, were a standing category in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookery, alongside hot potato salad and wilted lettuce with bacon dressing. The trick of stirring eggs only partially, so yolk and white stay visibly distinct, turns up in period cookery writing as well.