Eggs, Fried
INGREDIENTS for small dish.-4 eggs, 3 oz. of lard, butter or clarified dripping. AVERAGE COST, 7d.
Place a delicately-clean frying-pan over a gentle fire; put in the fat, and allow it to come to the boiling-point. Break the eggs into cups, slip them into the boiling fat, and let them remain until the whites are delicately set; and, whilst they are frying, ladle a little of the fat over them.
Take them up with a slice, drain them for a minute from their greasy moisture, trim them neatly, and serve on slices of fried bacon or ham; or the eggs may be placed in the middle of the dish, with the bacon put round as a garnish.
TIME.-2 to 3 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Eggs à la Maître de Hotel.- INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons. 16. of fresh butter, 1 tablespoonful of flour, pint of milk, pepper and salt to taste, 1 EGGS, TO PICKLE. tablespoonful of minced parsley, the juice of a lemon, 6 eggs. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Put the flour and half the butter into a stewpan; stir them over the fire until the mixture thickens; pour in the milk, which should be boiling; add a seasoning of pepper and salt, and simmer the whole for 5 minutes. Put the remainder of the butter into the sauce, and add the minced parsley; then boil the eggs hard, strip off the shell, cut the eggs into quarters, and put them on a dish. Bring the sauce to the boiling point, add the lemon-juice, pour over the eggs and serve.
TIME.-5 minutes to boil the sauce; the eggs, 10 to 15 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Two egg dishes run together here: eggs fried in deep fat, and hard-boiled eggs in a parsley-lemon white sauce. Both are workable, though the fat quantity and the egg timings belong to another era.
- The fat is the pointThree ounces of lard or dripping gives a shallow pool rather than a film, enough to ladle over the eggs. Basting the tops with hot fat sets the whites without turning the eggs, which is why no flipping is mentioned.
- "Boiling-point" fatFat does not boil in the way water does; the phrase means hot enough to shimmer and set an egg white on contact. If the white browns and blisters at the edge immediately, the pan is too hot for the "delicately set" result asked for.
- Clarified drippingBeef or pork dripping with the meat juices and water strained out. Lard, ghee or a neutral high-smoke-point oil behave the same way here; butter alone will brown and speckle before the whites set.
- Trim them neatlyWorth doing. Lift the egg to a paper or cloth, blot the underside, and cut away the ragged skirt of set white with a knife or round cutter so the egg sits cleanly on the bacon.
- YieldThe heading says only "small dish"; four eggs with bacon or ham is a breakfast for two.
- The maitre d'hotel sauceA plain white sauce: cook flour in butter, add hot milk, season, simmer. The recipe adds the second piece of butter and then brings the sauce back to the boil; keeping it below a hard boil, with the lemon juice in only at the end, keeps the sauce glossy rather than split or curdled-looking.
- Ten to fifteen minutes for hard eggsThat is long enough to green the yolk surface and toughen the white. Nine to ten minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives a set yolk that still quarters cleanly.
- A gill and other small measuresSmall measures -- Where Mrs Beeton's egg sauces call for a gill, that is 5 imperial fluid ounces, about two-thirds of an American cup; a pint in this book is the imperial 20 fl oz, a quarter more than the American pint.
Mrs Beeton's fried egg is fried in a standing quantity of rendered fat kept beside the range, basted rather than turned. Dripping was not a compromise but a valued by-product of the roast, saved, clarified and used until it was gone. The pairing with fried bacon or ham reflects the mid-century English breakfast as it settled into its familiar shape, and the average cost of sevenpence is the kind of detail that made the book's reputation: Beeton's readers were often young mistresses budgeting a household for the first time, and every entry told them what the dish would take out of the week's money. The second dish is generally traced to the maitre d'hotel, whose butter, worked with parsley and lemon, gives the sauce its flavouring.