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Hard Boiled Eggs
Follow the directions for soft boiled eggs No. 1, letting the eggs remain in water forty-five minutes. Chop fine, and add one-half teaspoon of butter and a few grains of salt and paprika to each egg.
This is the slow-cooked hard egg: no rolling boil, just a long soak in water that started out hot. It gives a tender, evenly set white rather than the rubbery one a hard boil produces, and the chopped result is meant as a filling, garnish or spread rather than a dish on its own.
- The method it refers back to"Soft boiled eggs No. 1" is not reproduced on this page. The long time points to the off-the-heat coddling method common in books of this period: bring water to a boil, remove from the heat, lower in the eggs, cover, and leave the pan off the burner. Use plenty of water so it holds its heat, and keep the lid on for the full time.
- Forty-five minutes is not a misprintOff the heat the water cools slowly, setting both white and yolk without ever agitating them. Modern hard-boiling at a full simmer takes 10-12 minutes; the two are not interchangeable, and cutting the coddled time short leaves a soft centre.
- Why the long soak was preferredWhy the long soak may have been preferred -- water that never returns to a boil is less likely to toughen the albumen or to throw a grey-green ring of iron sulphide around the yolk, though a long hold can still discolour it a little.
- "A few grains"A pinch, no more than about 1/16 teaspoon. The paprika on American shelves at this date would generally have been mild sweet Hungarian rather than the smoked kind.
- Butter proportionHalf a teaspoon per egg is barely enough to bind. Soften it first and work it into the still-warm chopped egg, or it will sit in flecks.
- PeelingVery fresh eggs shell stubbornly however they are cooked. Crack and peel them under cold running water as soon as the time is up.
Meatless Cookery belongs to the First World War kitchen literature that appeared in the United States around 1917, when the Food Administration asked households to keep meatless and wheatless days and eggs, cheese and legumes were promoted as the substitute protein. That context explains why a book of this kind gives a hard-cooked egg its own numbered entry with a cross-reference: the egg was being treated as a main-dish ingredient, not a breakfast afterthought. The slow off-the-heat method itself is older than the war and appears in nineteenth-century invalid and nursery cookery, where gentle cooking was held to make eggs more digestible.