Boiled Eggs
Drop into boiling water and boil 3 to 3 1/2 minutes for soft boiled, 12 to 20 minutes for hard boiled. Another method is to place eggs in boiling water, cover, and cook over moderate heat without boiling from 8 to 10 minutes for soft boiled, 20 to 40 minutes for hard boiled.
A bare-bones reference entry rather than a recipe in the usual sense, and the timings are longer than anything a modern cook would use. The second method — hot water off the boil — is the one worth keeping.
- The hinge: heat, not timeEgg white sets around 145F and yolk around 158F; water at a rolling boil is 212F and every extra minute past setting is toughening. The "cook without boiling" method here gives a gentler result and is the better of the two.
- Hard-boiled at 20 to 40 minutesThat range produces a rubbery white and a chalky yolk ringed with grey-green iron sulphide. Twelve minutes in water brought to a boil then covered and taken off the heat is plenty for a large egg.
- Egg size has driftedEgg size may matter -- the book gives no egg size, and timings for boiled eggs depend on it. Judge by the eggs in front of you and allow a little longer for very large ones.
- Cold eggs crackCold eggs may crack -- a refrigerator-cold egg dropped into boiling water can split its shell. Let them come up in temperature or lower them in on a spoon.
- Soft-boiled at 3 minutesThree minutes gives a white still loose at the top: fine for eating from the shell with a spoon, but not a set white.
- Stopping the cookingNothing here tells you to cool the eggs, and carryover heat keeps working in the shell. A minute in cold water halts it and makes peeling easier.
Boiled eggs need no recipe, which is precisely why their appearance in a book like this is interesting: cookbooks of the early twentieth century often aimed to be complete household references, so they carried the elementary alongside the elaborate for the benefit of young or newly independent cooks with no one at home to ask. Two methods are given, the first simply timing the boil, the second calling for a gentler, moderate heat. The long hard-boiling times, common in books of the era, are generally traced to a belief that eggs needed thorough cooking to be digestible, a notion that outlasted its usefulness by several decades.