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Stuffed Eggs
Hard-boil your eggs, allowing half an egg for each person. Take out the yolk. While they are boiling and afterwards cooling in water, make a small quantity of mayonnaise sauce. Peel the eggs, cut them through lengthways, and take out the yolks. Crumble these with a little chopped herbs, and add the mayonnaise. Fill the eggs with this mixture, and place them in a dish with chopped lettuce round it, to which you may add a little more of the sauce. Poached Eggs, Tomato Sauce Make some rounds of toast and butter them; place on each a slice of tongue or of ham. Keep these hot, and poach as many eggs as you require. Slip each egg on the toasts, and cover them quickly with a highly seasoned tomato sauce.
Two cold-larder egg dishes run together on one page, both written for a cook who already knows the basics. The instructions are terse and one step is duplicated; read them through before starting.
- The doubled stepThe original tells you to remove the yolks twice — once before peeling, once after. Ignore the first: hard-boil, cool in water, peel, halve lengthways, then lift the yolks out.
- Quantity"Half an egg for each person" means one half-egg per person as part of a larger cold table, not a main course. At that rate six people need three eggs (six halves); serve more if it is standing as a first course on its own.
- MayonnaiseMade from scratch this is raw yolk, oil and vinegar or lemon, and it was expected to be mixed while the eggs boiled. Use pasteurized eggs if you make your own, or good bottled mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice; either way keep the filled eggs refrigerated and serve within a few hours.
- "Chopped herbs"Unspecified, as was normal. A fines herbes mixture — parsley, chervil, chives, tarragon — suits it; chervil is worth hunting down if you can get it.
- Texture of the fillingCrumble the yolks fine with a fork before the mayonnaise goes in, and add it a teaspoon at a time. Too much at once and you get a slack paste that will not sit in the whites; a piping bag is easier than a spoon.
- Boiling the eggsTwelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives a set yolk without the grey-green ring the older long-boil method produced. The book's own instruction to cool them in water is the important half of that.
- The poached eggsTongue is the period touch and may need ordering from a butcher; thin-sliced ham or good boiled bacon stands in without loss. Poach the eggs three minutes for a liquid yolk and drain them properly on a cloth, or the toast collapses.
- "Highly seasoned tomato sauce"This means a cooked, well-seasoned sauce rather than a raw or sweetened one. Have it hot and pourable before the eggs go in the water; the whole point is that it covers them quickly.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in England during the First World War from recipes given by Belgian refugees, and its purpose was as much charitable and patriotic as culinary — proceeds and sympathy for a displaced people, and a record of how they had eaten at home. That accounts for the tone of pages like this one: no weights, no times, and two dishes crammed into a single entry. Stuffed eggs dressed with mayonnaise and a bed of lettuce belong to the everyday Franco-Belgian cold table, where hard-boiled eggs, fines herbes and a hand-whisked mayonnaise were staples rather than party food. The poached eggs on toast with tongue and tomato sauce show the other current running through the book, the influence of French restaurant garnishes on middle-class Belgian home cooking — an egg set on a base and masked with a sauce is the same logic that produced dozens of named egg dishes in the kitchens of the period.