Scrambled Eggs
4 eggs 4 tablespoons milk or water 1/2 tablespoon butter Salt and pepper Break the eggs in a bowl and beat them thoroughly; add the milk and seasoning and beat again. Melt the butter in a fryingpan over the fire; pour in the eggs; stir occasionally but not con.. stantly until they thicken; then serve at once.
A four-egg scramble with almost no room for error, provided the heat stays low. The one direction worth taking seriously is the last one: serve at once.
- Heat is the hinge"over the fire" tells us nothing about the appliance, but on a range of this period the cook adjusted heat largely by moving the pan. Use low to medium-low; egg proteins begin to set well below the boil and turn granular and weepy before they look overcooked.
- Milk or waterWater gives a lighter, puffier curd because it steams; milk gives a richer, softer one. A tablespoon per egg is generous by modern habit, and either will loosen the set noticeably.
- Butter quantityHalf a tablespoon for four eggs is thin coverage in a modern nonstick pan and barely enough in steel or cast iron. A full tablespoon is closer to current practice and does no harm.
- "Stir occasionally but not constantly"This is deliberate and correct: intermittent stirring builds large soft curds, while constant stirring makes small tight ones. Pull the pan while the eggs still look slightly underdone, since they carry on cooking off the heat.
- Pan sizeAn 8-inch pan suits four eggs. Too wide and the eggs spread into a thin sheet that sets before you can stir it.
- YieldTwo servings as a main breakfast, three or four alongside other dishes.
Scrambled eggs need no origin story, but their presence in a loose-leaf cook book of the early twentieth century says something about how such books were built. The loose-leaf format let a household add, remove and reorder pages. The recipe is plain in the manner often associated with the domestic science movement, in which even boiled and scrambled eggs were given exact tablespoon measures. The instruction to stir occasionally rather than constantly is the one line here that a modern chef would still endorse without alteration.