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Country Eggs
Make a white sauce thickly mixed with onions, such as you would eat in England with a leg of mutton, but do not forget a little seasoning of mace. Make a high mold of mashed potatoes, and then scoop it out from the top, leaving the bottom and high sides of the vegetable. While your sauce is kept by the fire (the potatoes also), boil six eggs for two minutes, shell them, and you will find the white just set and no more. Pour the onion sauce into the potato, and drop in the whole eggs and serve very hot.
A dish of two hot components assembled at the last second: a stiff potato case, an onion béchamel, and eggs cooked only just enough to hold together. Nothing here is difficult, but the timing is unforgiving and the original gives no quantities at all.
- The hinge: shelling a two-minute eggAt two minutes the white is barely set and the shell membrane clings to it, so the eggs tear if you rush. Lift them straight into cold water for thirty seconds, crack the shell all over and peel under running water, supporting the egg in your palm. Slightly older eggs (a week or more) release far more cleanly than very fresh ones.
- Quantities, since none are givenFor six eggs, reckon on about 2 lb floury potatoes for the mold and roughly 2 cups of sauce. Anything much thinner than a coating consistency will collapse the potato walls.
- The onion sauceEnglish onion sauce for mutton is a plain white sauce loaded with onion: simmer 2 large onions, chopped, in milk until soft, then thicken with a roux of 2 tbsp each butter and flour using that milk. It should be, as the book says, thickly mixed with onions rather than merely onion-flavoured.
- MaceBlade mace is the dried outer covering (aril) of the nutmeg seed, with a related but distinct flavour. Ground mace is easier to find; an eighth of a teaspoon is enough for this quantity of sauce, or steep a whole blade in the milk and fish it out.
- Building the moldMash the potatoes stiff, with butter and little or no milk, so they hold a shape. Pile them into a domed mound on a heatproof dish, hollow the top to leave a wall an inch thick, and keep it hot -- the original simply holds it by the fire; a very low oven does the same job. A piped border of potato is the modern equivalent and holds better.
- Serve at onceThe sauce softens the potato wall from the moment it goes in, and the eggs firm up as they sit. Assemble at the table if you can. Six eggs would make a supper dish for about three, or a first course for six.
- Soft yolksThe yolks here are entirely liquid. That is the point of the dish, but anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised should use pasteurized shell eggs or eat something else.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and sold in aid of relief funds; the food is therefore Belgian home cooking as remembered and dictated in exile, often explained by way of English comparisons. This entry is a clear example — the cook cannot assume her English reader knows the sauce, so she reaches for the onion sauce served with roast mutton, and adds mace, which was still a common English store-cupboard spice. The potato case belongs to a wider Northern European habit of using stiff mashed potato as a serving vessel or piped border, a technique that filled restaurant and household cookery well into the twentieth century before it fell out of fashion.