Eggs, Scrambled
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons. -6 eggs, 1 oz. of butter, pepper, salt, 4 slices of buttered toast.
AVERAGE COST, 9d.
Put the butter in a saucepan, and break into it the eggs, and season well with pepper and salt. Beat the mixture while cooking with a fork, but do not thoroughly amalgamate the yolks and whites. After about 2 minutes, remove the pan to the side of the fire to finish cooking. The eggs should be set. Have ready some slices of toast hot and buttered, spread on them the egg and serve immediately.
TIME.-5 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Eggs, Snow, or Œufs à la
A straightforward set of instructions that assumes a coal range with hot and cool zones. The translation to a modern hob is mostly about heat control.
- "The side of the fire"On a range, the edge of the plate was gentle residual heat. On a gas or induction hob, use the lowest setting, or simply lift the pan off the burner for a few seconds at a time and keep stirring — the residual heat in the pan finishes the job.
- 1 oz. of butterAbout 30 g, or two tablespoons, for six eggs. Generous by modern habit but it is what keeps the curds soft; do not cut it back.
- Not amalgamating yolks and whitesThis is the hinge. Beeton breaks the eggs straight into the pan rather than whisking them first, which gives streaks of set white against yellow curd. If you want the uniform pale scramble most people expect now, beat the eggs in a bowl first.
- Two minutes, then off the heatTwo minutes, then to a cooler spot -- the recipe moves the pan to the side of the fire to finish, with 5 minutes given as the total time. Eggs carry on cooking in the pan after you move it, so pull them while they still look slightly wet, though the original does ask for the eggs to be set.
- Pan choiceA heavy-based saucepan or a nonstick pan, not a thin frying pan. The original specifies a saucepan; the idea that its own mass moderates the heat once it leaves the fire is an inference, not something the recipe says.
- Season before or afterSalt is added at the start here. Some modern cooks salt at the end on the theory that early salt loosens the curd; the difference over a two-minute cook is small, so follow the original if you like.
- Average cost, 9d.Ninepence for a dish serving four, a period price with no useful modern equivalent. It is there because the Beeton books gave an average cost for most recipes, for household budgeting.
- YieldSix eggs on four slices of toast is a light breakfast or supper portion by current standards. Two eggs a head is a more usual modern serving.
Scrambled eggs on toast belong to the English breakfast and supper table rather than to any grand tradition, and Beeton's version is notable mainly for what it does not do: there is no cream, no milk, no preliminary beating in a bowl. The eggs go straight into hot butter and are broken up with a fork as they set, which produces something closer to a loose, marbled fried egg than the smooth custardy scramble made by cooking the eggs slowly over very low heat or a bain-marie. The entry sits in the alphabetical run of egg dishes that made All About Cookery useful as a reference book o a a long series of expanded and revised household volumes published under Beeton's name after Isabella Beeton's death in 1865, so the wording here may well reflect the publisher's editors as much as the original author.