Eggs, Alpine
INGREDIENTS for dish for 3 or 4 persons.-4 eggs, 6 oz. of cheese, 2 oz. of butter, a little chopped parsley, pepper and salt. AVERAGE COST, 10d. EGGS, BUTTERED.
Butter a baking-tin thoroughly, and line it with the greater part of the cheese cut in slices; break over this the eggs without breaking the yolks, and season with pepper and salt. Grate the remainder of the cheese and put with it the chopped parsley; lay this over the top, and upon it put small pieces of butter. Bake in a quick oven for 10 minutes.
TIME. To bake, 10 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Eggs, To Boil (for Breakfast, Salads, &c.). - Eggs for boiling cannot be too fresh, or boiled too soon after they are laid; but rather a longer time should be allowed for boiling a new-laid egg than for one that is three or four days old.
Have ready a saucepan of boiling water; put the eggs into it gently with a spoon, letting the spoon touch the bottom of the saucepan before it is withdrawn, that the egg may not fall, and consequently crack.
For those who like eggs lightly boiled, 3¾ minutes will be found sufficient: 3 to 4 minutes will be ample time to set the white nicely; and if liked hard, 6 to 7 minutes will not be found too long. Should the eggs be unusually large, as those of black Spanish fowls sometimes are, allow an extra 1/2 minute for them. Eggs for EGG-STAND FOR THE BREAKFAST-TABLE. salads should be boiled from 10 minutes to 1/4 hour, and should be placed in a basin of cold water for a few minutes; they should then be rolled on the table with the hand, and the shell will peel off easily.
TIME. To boil eggs lightly, for invalids or children, 3¾ minutes; to boil eggs to suit the generality of taste, 3 to 4 minutes; to boil eggs hard, 6 to 7 minutes; for salads, 10 to 15 minutes.
Two things sit side by side here: a baked cheese-and-egg dish and Mrs Beeton's directions for boiled eggs. The page as printed is scrambled by the book's running headings, so read the first block as the Alpine eggs and everything from "Eggs, To Boil" onward as a separate entry.
- Quick ovenA "quick oven" is a hot one, roughly 400-450F (200-230C). Ten minutes at that heat sets the whites and leaves the yolks soft; at a gentler temperature the cheese will not brown in the time given.
- The dishThe book says only "baking-tin". A shallow tin or gratin dish large enough to hold the four eggs in one layer suits the method, since the eggs are broken over a lining of cheese rather than stacked.
- Which cheeseThe name points at a firm Alpine cheese - Gruyere, Emmental, Comte. Six ounces is about 1 1/2 cups grated. Slices go on the bottom, the remainder grated over the top.
- The hingeBreak the eggs onto the cheese without piercing the yolks, and take the dish out while the whites are only just opaque. The residual heat of the melted cheese keeps cooking them on the way to the table.
- YieldAs stated, four eggs for three or four people, which suits a breakfast or supper dish with toast. For a main course, count one to two eggs a head and scale the cheese with them.
- Boiled eggs, timesThe three-to-four-minute figures still hold for a soft egg from cold-ish storage, but 10 to 15 minutes for salad eggs is well past done - it gives a chalky yolk and a grey-green ring. Eight to ten minutes off the boil is enough for a firm yolk.
- CrackingBeeton's spoon trick works, but eggs straight from the refrigerator crack in boiling water regardless. Let them stand at room temperature first, or start them in water that is barely simmering.
- Average cost10d. is tenpence in pre-decimal currency, one twenty-fourth of a pound (240 pence to the pound). It is a note on relative household economy rather than anything convertible.
This entry comes from the alphabetical reference format of the later Beeton compilations, where whole categories were run together under a headword - hence "Eggs, Alpine" bumping straight into "Eggs, Buttered" and "Eggs, To Boil" with the printed page headings caught in the middle. "Alpine" here presumably signals a Swiss-style hard cheese; imports of mountain cheeses such as Gruyere and Emmental were increasingly available to British grocers over the nineteenth century, though how widely the label was applied is not something this page can tell us. The boiled-egg passage is a good example of what these books were actually for. Eggs were seasonal and variable, and a cook needed to be told that a new-laid egg takes longer than one a few days old - a point that reads as fussy now but mattered when eggs came from the yard rather than a carton with a date on it.