Eggs, Savoury
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons.-4 eggs, 1/2 oz. of butter, anchovy sauce or paste, cayenne, 8 croûtons, Montpélier butter, aspic jelly. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Boil the eggs for 10 minutes and put them into cold water; when cold shell them and cut them in half, cut off a small piece at each end, so that they will stand, and take out the yolks. Spread the croûtons with Montpélier butter (plain butter and rounds of toast may be substituted), and stand on each half an egg. Pound the yolks with the anchovy, adding enough to flavour the egg, the cayenne to taste, and the butter, and fill the whites with the mixture. Arrange the croûtons with the eggs EGGS, SNOW. in a ring on a plate or dish, and garnish with a little aspic jelly, if at hand, roughed with a fork, and watercress or parsley.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A Victorian stuffed egg, essentially devilled eggs served upright on fried bread rather than lying on a platter. Nothing here is difficult, but three of the ingredients are period shorthand that needs unpacking.
- Montpélier butterA compound butter of parsley, chervil, tarragon, chives, watercress, capers, gherkin and anchovy, pounded with butter and often tinted green with blanched spinach. Beeton's own parenthesis gives you permission to skip it: plain butter on toast rounds works, though a herb butter is closer to the intent.
- CroûtonsHere evidently rounds of bread fried in butter or fat rather than diced cubes: the recipe offers 'rounds of toast' as the substitute, and each croûton has to carry half an egg standing upright. Cut them large enough for the egg to sit level.
- Half an ounce of butterAbout 1 tablespoon, for the yolk filling only. The butter spread on the croûtons is additional and unmeasured.
- Anchovy sauce or pasteVictorian anchovy sauce was a thin bottled condiment; modern anchovy paste in a tube is far more concentrated. Start with a scant half teaspoon for four yolks and taste, or mash one oil-packed fillet instead.
- Boiling timeTen minutes gives the firm, dry yolk you need for pounding; longer cooking encourages the grey-green ring at the yolk's edge. The cold water the recipe calls for stops the cooking and generally makes the shells easier to peel.
- Aspic jellyA clear savoury gelatine set from clarified stock, chilled firm and then broken up with a fork so it glitters. Unflavoured gelatine set in good strong stock does the same job; it is genuinely optional, as the recipe admits.
- CayenneSeason with restraint and let it sit ten minutes before tasting again; ground cayenne blooms in a fatty mixture and a filling that seemed mild will not stay that way.
- YieldEight halves, two per person, as a savoury course or a first course. Fill with a piping bag if you want them to look like the plate the book imagines.
- The stray line"EGGS, SNOW." partway through the text is a running head from the next entry that has fallen into the paragraph. Ignore it.
This belongs to the English savoury — a small, sharply seasoned dish served late in dinner, after the sweet and before the dessert of fruit, a habit particularly associated with Britain. Anchovy, cayenne and cress are the standard savoury vocabulary. Montpélier butter takes its name from the southern French city and reached English kitchens through the French professional tradition that shaped Victorian cookery writing; it was also commonly used as a coating for cold salmon. The parenthesis allowing 'plain butter and rounds of toast' suggests a readership working with little or no kitchen help from an alphabetical reference book.