Darioles of Eggs
INGREDIENTS for 6 darioles -5 eggs, 4 oz. of bread-crumbs, a tomato, a little chopped parsley, 3 tablespoonfuls of white sauce, seasoning. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Boil 3 eggs hard, and chop them and mix them with the other ingredients (the tomato skinned and mashed), and the yolks of 2 eggs raw. Put the mixture in buttered moulds, cover with buttered paper and steam for 20 minutes.
TIME.-20 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A small steamed egg mould from the era of the savoury course. It is straightforward, but a couple of the instructions assume equipment and habits that have since gone.
- Dariole mouldsThese are small tapered metal cups holding roughly 3-4 fl oz (about 100 ml). Individual dariole tins, deep ramekins, or a deep muffin tin all work; butter them thoroughly so the set custard turns out cleanly.
- Breadcrumbs4 oz here almost certainly means fresh soft crumbs, roughly two loosely packed cups from a day-old white loaf, though the recipe does not say so. Dried packaged crumbs absorb more liquid and will give a denser, drier result.
- White sauceA plain béchamel — butter, flour and milk, cooked out and seasoned. Three tablespoons is a small amount whose job is to moisten and enrich, not to dominate.
- SeasoningSalt and white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg is in keeping with the period. Taste the raw mixture before you fill the moulds; steamed egg mixtures taste flatter than they smell.
- The buttered paperThis is the instruction that matters. The paper (parchment today, or foil) keeps condensation from the steamer lid dripping onto the surface and waterlogging the tops. Do not skip it.
- Steaming heatKeep the water at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil. Egg mixtures cooked hard go rubbery and weep; gentle heat gives a tender set. Twenty minutes is right for standard dariole moulds — test with a skewer, which should come out clean.
- The tomatoSkin it by scoring and dropping into boiling water for 30 seconds. Seed it as well as mashing it, or the extra liquid will loosen the mixture.
- Yield and servingSix small moulds, enough for six as a starter or savoury, or three as a light lunch with salad. Turn them out and serve hot with tomato sauce or a spoonful of the same white sauce thinned down.
Dariole is an old word in the English kitchen vocabulary, appearing in medieval cookery manuscripts for small filled pastry cases; the name is usually said to have transferred from the pastry to the little tapered mould it was baked in, and by the nineteenth century a dariole meant any small moulded preparation, sweet or savoury, turned out of that shape. This one belongs to the savoury course, the small hot dish served after the sweet at a late-Victorian and Edwardian dinner, which is why it is seasoned rather than sugared and costed at a modest eightpence for six. It is also a frugal recipe of a familiar type: hard-boiled eggs, breadcrumbs and a few spoonfuls of leftover sauce, bound with raw yolk and steamed rather than baked.