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Eggs (Taking care not to break)
taking care not to break the yolk; sprinkle over the tops a little salt and pepper, and set in the blazer surrounded by hot water to two-thirds the height of the moulds. If, after a time, the water boils, even with the lamp turned low, put the blazer into the bath and continue cooking, until the eggs are set. The eggs should be covered while cooking. When cooked, turn from the moulds and serve with a purée of tomatoes. Half a cup of sliced mushrooms added to the purée improves this dish.
This is the tail end of a chafing-dish recipe for eggs baked in individual moulds — the opening lines, which would have told you to butter the moulds and slide in a raw egg apiece, are on the previous page. What survives is the part that actually decides whether the dish works: gentle, covered, water-bath heat.
- The blazer and the hot-water panA chafing dish has two vessels: the blazer, the shallow pan that sits over the flame, and the hot-water pan or bath beneath it. Here the moulds stand in the blazer with water around them; if that water threatens to boil, the whole blazer is lifted into the water pan so the heat reaches the eggs only at second hand. A saucepan set inside a wider pan of barely steaming water does the same job.
- Keep the water below a simmerThis is the hinge. Egg protein sets around 150-160F, and water at a rolling boil will make the whites tough and weeping before the yolks thicken. Hold the bath at 170-180F — steaming, with no more than an occasional bubble.
- The mouldsSmall buttered ramekins, dariole moulds or custard cups, 3 to 4 oz each, one egg to a mould. Butter them generously and, if you intend to turn the eggs out whole as directed, line the base with a disc of buttered parchment.
- Water to two-thirds the heightMeasure this with the moulds in place and empty, before the eggs go in, or the displaced water will slop over the rims. Filled moulds sit lower.
- TimingThe original gives none. Covered, in water at 170-180F, expect 10 to 14 minutes for a set white and a yolk still soft. The whites will look opaque and the tops will no longer tremble when the pan is nudged.
- Purée of tomatoesIn this period that means fresh or canned tomatoes cooked down and passed through a sieve, seasoned, and often thickened lightly with butter and flour — not the concentrated tomato paste sold as purée today. Passata reduced by a third with butter and salt is the closer match.
- The mushroomsSliced mushrooms want cooking before they join the purée; added raw they will loosen the sauce with their own liquid. Sauté them in butter until they have given up their water and begun to colour.
- YieldOne mould per person as a first course, two for a light supper dish. Turn out and sauce at the table — this is chafing-dish food, meant to be finished in front of the people eating it.
Chafing-dish cookery had a considerable vogue in America either side of 1900, and books like this one catered to it: a spirit lamp, a blazer and a hot-water pan let a hostess cook at the table in a household with no servants, or in a bedsitter with no kitchen at all. Eggs were the mainstay of the genre — cheap, quick, and endlessly variable with a sauce. Cooking them in buttered moulds set in water is simply the old French oeufs moulés adapted to the apparatus, and a tomato purée beneath them was one of the common nineteenth-century sauces for eggs cooked out of the shell, whether moulded, poached or en cocotte. The instruction to move the blazer into the water bath the moment the water threatens to boil is a reminder of how little control an alcohol lamp gave: you could not turn it down much, so you changed the distance between flame and food instead.