Eggs Japanese
4 sardines 6 eggs 1 teaspoon anchovy paste 1 cup cream sauce 1/2 teaspoon onion juice Salt and pepper 2 cups boiled rice Boil the eggs for fifteen minutes; remove the shells and cut them in halves lengthwise. Take out the yolks; mash them; mix with the sardines, minced; add the seasoning and return to the egg cavities. Place the rice in a mound on a heated platter; on it arrange the eggs; cover all with cream sauce; garnish with parsley and serve. 2 slices onion
The ingredient list has come apart in printing — a hazard of loose-leaf cookbooks, where pages were meant to be shuffled and replaced. Eggs and sardines appear in the method but not the list, and the stray "2 slices onion" belongs with the sauce.
- Fill in the missing quantitiesNothing in the surviving list gives amounts, so work from something like six hard-cooked eggs and one small tin of sardines (about 3 3/4 oz), drained and boned. The anchovy paste, onion juice, salt and pepper season the yolk mixture; the two onion slices most likely belong to the cream sauce, for infusing the milk.
- Fifteen minutes is too longEggs held at a rolling boil that long give rubbery whites and a grey-green ring where sulphur meets iron in the yolk. Bring them just to a boil, cover, take off the heat and leave 10 to 12 minutes, then cool in cold water so the shells slip.
- Cream sauceA period cream sauce is a thin béchamel: 1 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp flour, 1 cup milk or half milk and cream, cooked out three or four minutes so it does not taste of raw flour. Infusing the onion slices in the warm milk and straining them out gives more flavour than dropping them in whole.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and use the liquid that collects. A tablespoon or so of grated pulp, pressed through a sieve, should yield roughly the half teaspoon called for.
- Salt with careAnchovy paste and tinned sardines are both heavily salted. Mix and taste the yolk filling before adding any salt at all.
- The riceTwo cups cooked rice, from roughly 2/3 cup raw. It should be dry and separate, not sticky, so the mound holds its shape under the sauce — warm the platter first or the whole dish goes tepid.
- YieldServes three as a light supper or lunch dish, six as a first course. Assemble at the last minute; the sauce skins over and the rice cools quickly.
The name reflects a turn-of-the-century habit, often noted, of labelling composed dishes served on a mound of rice "Japanese," much as "à l'indienne" generally signalled curry powder and "Creole" tomatoes he ddish itself is straightforwardly Anglo-American, a stuffed egg under béchamel. Sardines and anchovy paste were staple pantry goods in the era, cheap tinned protein that let a cook build a savoury supper without a trip to the butcher, and stuffed eggs with fish paste appear under many names in books of the period. Mrs. Fryer's book appears to belong to the loose-leaf genre, bound so a housekeeper could add her own cards and remove what she did not use — convenient in the kitchen, and the reason ingredient lists like this one sometimes reach us shuffled out of order.