Home › Vegetables › Hard-cooked Eggs
Hard-cooked Eggs
Cover eggs with boiling water and cook below the boiling point for forty minutes. Remove from pan, cover with cold water, and wipe before serving.
A one-line method that stands in for a technique the book assumes you already know. The forty minutes is not a typo, but it is far longer than modern practice needs.
- The hinge: below boilingThe whole point is that the water never returns to a rolling boil after the eggs go in. Held below the boil, the whites tend to set to a more even, tender curd rather than the rubbery ring a hard boil produces; the book gives no temperature.
- Forty minutes is generousOlder books favoured very long, very gentle cooking on the theory that it made eggs more digestible. Eggs cooked this way for 15 to 20 minutes off the heat in covered hot water are fully set; at forty minutes the yolk dries out and the sulphur note strengthens.
- "Hard-cooked," not "hard-boiled"The heading avoids "boiled," which fits a method that keeps the water below the boil. The same distinction survives in American usage today.
- The cold water is not optionalPlunging the eggs into cold water stops the cooking, prevents the grey-green ring where yolk meets white, and contracts the egg slightly from the shell so it peels cleanly.
- Egg sizeEggs of the period were not graded as they are now, so sizes were less consistent than today's large or extra-large; adjust timing to the eggs you have.
- Wiping before servingMost simply, it dries the shells after the cold water; eggs of the period also often reached the kitchen unwashed. Modern retail eggs are already washed.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other company cookbooks of its era it padded out its chocolate and cocoa formulas with a full course of general household cookery. That is why a bare-bones entry like this one appears at all: it is reference material, the kind of baseline technique a new housekeeper would be expected to have. The long, sub-boiling cook is characteristic of the turn of the century, when domestic-science writers such as Fannie Farmer and Ellen Richards recommended sub-boiling cookery, on the grounds that violently coagulated albumen was indigestible. The claim about digestibility was more asserted than proven, but the texture argument holds, and the gentle method has come back into favour on exactly those grounds.