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Soft Cooked Eggs
1. Flower Pot Eggs--Carefully break off the top of the egg shell, remove egg, place some shot or button molds in the bottom of the shell to make it stand erect. Then fill the shell with water and place some short-stemmed flowers in it. Serve this one on the tray with the soft cooked egg placed on cubes of hot toast. The child's name might also be printed on the egg-shell vase. 2. Eggs-in-Nest--Cut 2 inch thick slices of bread in circles. Scoop out the soft part from the center, leaving a thin layer at the bottom to hold the egg. Toast the bread circles on all sides. Break the soft cooked egg into the nest. 3. Dinner Nest Eggs--Dice cooked carrots very fine. Lightly butter them, and form into a circular nest on the plate. Drop the soft cooked egg into this nest, leaving the egg as nearly whole as possible.
Three presentations for a single soft-cooked egg, meant to be carried up on a tray to a sick child. The cooking is assumed rather than described, so the work here is in the staging.
- The egg itselfNo time is given because the book assumes you know it: a large egg lowered into simmering water generally needs about 5 minutes for a set white and liquid yolk, 6 to 7 for a yolk that is thick but still soft. Past 8 minutes the yolk sets firm, and it is no longer the soft cooked egg all three presentations are built around.
- Feeding the sick and the very youngA soft-cooked yolk never reaches a temperature that eliminates Salmonella. Current guidance is that anyone ill, elderly, pregnant or under five should have eggs cooked firm, or eggs that have been pasteurized in the shell -- which would include the children these presentations seem aimed at.
- Shot and button molds"Shot" here means birdshot, which in this period was lead, and some button molds were metal too. Use glass beads, clean pebbles or a ring of damp sand instead, and keep the ballast inside the shell rather than loose on the tray.
- The flowersChoose the flower with the same care you would give the food. Sweet peas, daffodils, lily of the valley and delphinium are all toxic if a child chews a stem. Violets, pansies, nasturtiums and rose petals are safe company for a plate.
- The eggshell vaseCrack the top off with the back of a knife rather than tapping, empty and rinse the shell in hot water, then dry it. Two eggs are wanted for this version: the one that gives the shell and the one that gets soft cooked.
- Bread for the nestTwo inches is a genuinely thick slab, cut from an unsliced sandwich loaf. Use a wide cutter or a tumbler for the circle and a small spoon to hollow it, leaving about a quarter inch at the base. Toast it dry on all sides so the walls hold their shape once the egg goes in.
- The carrot nestThe carrots are cooked first, then diced very fine; butter them lightly while still warm so the pieces cling together. Building the ring on a warm plate keeps the carrot from chilling the egg.
- YieldEach of the three is a single serving. Have the toast or the carrots ready before the egg comes out of the water, since the point of all three is that the egg arrives hot.
Invalid cookery was a fixed department of household manuals through the nineteenth century and well into the 1930s, on the reasoning that a patient with no appetite might be coaxed by appearance where plain nourishment failed. The eggshell flower vase and the printed name belong to a strand of that literature aimed at sick children, where the tray was expected to entertain as much as feed. The soft-cooked egg was among the standard invalid foods of the era, valued as concentrated nourishment that needed no chewing. A modern reader is likelier to meet the eggs-in-nest idea under a name such as egg in a basket, where the bread is fried with a raw egg dropped through a hole in the center rather than hollowed and toasted first.