Boiled Eggs
Have ready a saucepan containing boiling water. Carefully put in with a spoon the number of eggs desired, covering them with water. Remove saucepan to back of range, where water will not boil. Cook from six to eight minutes if liked "soft-boiled," forty to forty-five if liked "hardboiled." Eggs may be cooked by placing in cold water and allowing water to heat gradually until the boiling-point is reached, when they will be "soft boiled." In using hardboiled eggs for making other dishes, when taken from the hot water they should be plunged into cold water to prevent, if possible, discoloration of yolks.
Eggs perfectly cooked should be placed and kept in water at a uniform temperature of 175° F.
Dropped Eggs (Poached) Have ready a frying-pan two-thirds full of boiling salted water, allowing one-half tablespoon salt to one quart of water. Put two or three buttered muffin rings in the water. Break each egg separately into a saucer, and carefully slip into a muffin ring. The water should cover the eggs. When there is a film over the top, and the white is firm, carefully remove with a buttered skimmer to circular pieces of buttered toast, and let each person season his own egg with butter, salt, and pepper. If cooked for an invalid, garnish with four toast-points and a bit of parsley. An egg-poacher may be used instead of muffin rings.
This is the coddling method, not a rolling boil, and the long times only make sense once you understand that. Read the temperatures before you set a timer.
- The hinge: the water never boilsEggs go into boiling water, then the pan comes off the heat entirely. Everything after that happens in water falling from about 212F toward the 175F the recipe names, which is why hard-cooked eggs need forty minutes rather than ten.
- "Back of range"On a coal or wood range, the far corner of the top was the coolest spot, used for holding things below a simmer. On a modern hob, cover the pan and pull it off the burner altogether; the lowest gas setting will usually still hold a simmer.
- Forty-five minutes is not a misprintAt a true boil, a large egg is hard-cooked in ten to twelve minutes. The long time here is the price of the gentle heat, and the reward is a tender white instead of a rubbery one.
- 175FEgg white sets from roughly 145F and yolk from about 158F, so 175F cooks both through with a wide margin against toughening. A probe thermometer in the water makes this method far easier than it was in 1896.
- The green ringThe "discoloration of yolks" is iron sulphide, formed when overcooked eggs sit hot. The cold plunge stops it, and gentle cooking largely prevents it in the first place.
- Muffin ringsThese were shallow metal hoops used to shape English muffins. Any buttered ring mould, or a wide biscuit cutter, works; so does swirling the water and slipping the egg into the vortex.
- Poaching waterHalf a tablespoon of salt per quart is lighter than many modern recommendations. A tablespoon of vinegar per quart, which the book does not mention, helps the white gather.
- Poaching timeNo time is given; the cue is visual, a film over the top and a firm white, roughly three minutes in water held just below a simmer.
- YieldOne or two eggs per person; the poached version makes a single serving per round of toast.
This is Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book at its most characteristic: an everyday operation restated with a number attached. The insistence on 175F reflects a late-nineteenth-century interest in the coagulation temperatures of egg albumen, which cooking-school teachers took up eagerly as proof that the kitchen could be taught as applied science rather than knack. The gentle, off-the-boil method was also standard invalid cookery, and the note about garnishing a poached egg with toast points and parsley for the sick belongs to a chapter of household practice, since feeding convalescents was a normal domestic duty and eggs were among the foods commonly prescribed. The muffin rings are a reminder of how much equipment a well-run kitchen of the 1890s kept on hand for jobs a modern cook improvises.