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Laboratory Exercises (Soft Cooked Eggs Put water)
Soft Cooked Eggs. 1. Put water on to boil. 2. Wash eggs. 3. When water is boiling, place eggs in water, cover the saucepan and remove to the back of the stove for eight to ten minutes, where the water will keep hot but not boil. Note.-Have the water completely cover the eggs while cooking. Hard Cooked Eggs.
Follow the recipe for soft cooked eggs. Let the eggs stand in the hot water from forty-five minutes to one hour. Goldenrod Eggs. 4 T. butter 3 T. flour t. salt 2 C. milk 4 hard cooked eggs 6 slices toast 1. Make a white sauce of the flour, butter, salt and milk. 2. Cut the whites of the eggs into small pieces, add to the white sauce and pour over the toast. 3. Rub the yolks through a strainer over the top of the 4. Garnish with parsley; serve hot.
Creamed Eggs. wise. 6 hard cooked eggs 2 C. medium white sauce 1. Cut eggs in halves lengthwise or in 1-inch slices cross 2. Add to white sauce, reheat and serve with plain boiled potatoes.
Scrambled Eggs. 6 eggs C. milk t. salt 2 T. butter 1. Beat eggs slightly. Add milk and salt. 2. Melt butter in upper part of the double boiler, add the egg mixture, place over hot water and stir constantly until it becomes creamy. 3. Remove from fire, turn into hot dish or pour over slices of toast, garnish with parsley and serve immediately. Note. If cooked too long, the eggs will separate and you will have a mixture of hard lumps of egg and water.
French Omelet. 2 eggs 1/4 t. salt 2 T. milk or water 2 t. butter 1. Beat eggs slightly, add salt and milk. 2. Melt the butter in a frying pan and pour in the egg mixture. As the egg thickens, lift it slightly with a fork or knife, letting the uncooked part run underneath. 3. When creamy all through roll it up, rolling toward the left side of the pan and turn onto a hot platter. Serve at once. Poached Egg on Toast. 6 eggs 6 slices toast butter, salt, pepper. 1. Make toast. 2. Have ready a shallow pan of water that is boiling gently. 3. Break eggs carefully into a saucer and slip them into EGGS the water. Do not break the yolks. Have the water cover the eggs. 4. Remove the pan from the fire and let stand until the white is firm and a thin film covers the yolks. 5. Lift the eggs out carefully with a perforated skimmer and place on toast that has been slightly buttered. 6. Dust eggs lightly with salt and pepper and serve immediately. 130
A sequence of egg exercises from a school laboratory manual, written for a coal or wood range where a pan pushed to the back of the stove holds heat without boiling. On a modern hob the equivalent is to bring water to a boil, add the eggs, cover, and take the pan off the heat entirely.
- The residual-heat methodMost of the eggs here are cooked below boiling, which is the point of the lesson: hard-boiled eggs cooked at a rolling boil turn rubbery and develop a green-grey ring where iron and sulphur meet at the yolk surface. Off-heat in covered water, eight to ten minutes gives a set white and a softly set yolk in a large egg.
- Hard cooked eggsForty-five minutes to an hour of standing assumes a heavy pan of water that starts at a full boil and cools slowly; a thin modern saucepan will lose heat faster. Around fifteen minutes off the heat, covered, then straight into cold water, is a workable modern equivalent.
- Missing fractionsSeveral quantities have lost their fractions in this printing. Plausible readings are 1/2 teaspoon salt for the white sauce (with 4 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour and 2 cups milk), and about 1/2 cup milk with 1/2 teaspoon salt for six scrambled eggs — but the original figures cannot be recovered from the page.
- White sauce proportionsFour tablespoons butter and three of flour to two cups milk works out at about 1 1/2 tablespoons flour per cup, thinner than the two tablespoons per cup these manuals usually call medium, though still thick enough to coat toast without soaking it. Cook the flour in the butter a minute or so before the milk goes in or the sauce tastes pasty.
- Goldenrod eggsThe name comes from the sieved yolk scattered over the white sauce. Push the yolks through a fine strainer directly onto the plated toast at the last moment; done early they dry and clump. Six slices of toast serves three to six depending on whether it is breakfast or supper.
- Scrambled eggs in a double boilerThe manual's warning is the hinge of the recipe. Over water the eggs cannot exceed 100C, so they curdle slowly and stay creamy, but they will still weep if held past the point where they mound on the spoon. Pull them while they look slightly underdone.
- French omeletTwo eggs suits a small frying pan of roughly 20 cm, though the recipe specifies no size; with much more egg the omelet becomes hard to roll. The pan must be hot enough that the egg sets on contact, and the cooking takes only a minute or two.
- Poached eggsThe gently boiling water is for slipping the eggs in; the pan comes off the heat immediately after, so the eggs set in still water and hold their shape. Very fresh eggs hold together far better than old ones. A tablespoon of vinegar in the water helps the white coagulate, though the manual does not use it.
This page comes from a domestic-science manual written for school laboratories, where cooking was taught as applied chemistry rather than as family tradition — hence "Laboratory Exercises" and the numbered procedural steps. Egg cookery was often an early unit because it demonstrates protein coagulation so plainly: the same ingredient, treated at different temperatures and for different times, yields a soft yolk, a firm yolk, a creamy scramble or a curdled mess, and the notes attached to the scrambled eggs and the soft cooked eggs are there to make the principle explicit. The insistence on water that is hot but not boiling reflects the great lesson of the period's cooking-school movement, promoted heavily in American schools from the 1880s onward: that eggs are spoiled by high heat. Goldenrod eggs, said by tradition to be named for the sieved yellow yolk sprinkled over creamed white, was a lunchroom and church-supper staple in the United States for decades and appears widely in cookbooks and manuals of the era as a thrifty way to stretch a few eggs across a family with milk, flour and stale bread.