Egg Farci II
Clean and chop two chickens' livers, sprinkle with onion juice, and sauté in butter. Add the yolks of four "hardboiled" eggs rubbed through a sieve, one teaspoon chopped parsley, and salt, pepper, and Tabasco Sauce to taste. Refill whites of eggs with mixture, cover with grated cheese, and bake until cheese melts. Serve in toast rings and pour around Tomato Purée (see p. 98).
A stuffed-egg dish meant for a luncheon or supper plate rather than a buffet tray. It comes together quickly once the eggs are cooked, and the only real risk is overcooking the livers.
- The hinge: don't overcook the liversChicken livers want two to three minutes in hot butter, until firm outside and barely pink within. Push them further and they turn chalky and bitter, which the tomato purée will not disguise.
- Onion juiceGrate a piece of onion on a fine grater and use the liquid and pulp that collect, or press grated onion through a sieve. About a teaspoon is right for two livers.
- Why "hardboiled" is in quotation marksThe quotation marks probably signal that the eggs are hard-cooked below a rolling boil rather than hard-boiled outright, a method these books favour to keep the whites tender. Cover the eggs with water, bring just to the boil, take off the heat and let stand covered until the yolks are firm, then cool in cold water so they shell cleanly.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe only asks that the cheese melt. A hot oven, 400F, for five to eight minutes does it; any longer and the whites toughen and weep. A broiler works too if watched.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in books of this period may mean a dry aged cheddar or another hard grating cheese. Use something that melts without flooding the egg with fat, and grate it fine so it fuses in the short bake.
- Toast ringsRounds of bread with the centres stamped out, then toasted or fried in butter, so each ring cradles a filled half. Plain thick toast rounds serve the same purpose.
- Tomato puréeTomato pur e -- A period tomato pur e of this kind is normally a thin cooked tomato sauce rather than the concentrated canned paste sold as pur e today. Simmered canned tomatoes, sieved and lightly thickened, are the likely consistency.
- YieldFour eggs give eight filled halves, enough for four people at lunch or eight as a first course. The filling is rich; the tomato is there to cut it.
Farci is simply French for "stuffed," and its appearance in an American cookbook of this period reflects how thoroughly the professional vocabulary of French cookery had settled into middle-class household manuals. Eggs were a standard answer to the luncheon question, a meal expected to be light, meatless or nearly so, and served without ceremony. Chicken livers here do the work of a savoury filling for very little money. The Tabasco is worth noting: the Louisiana pepper sauce had been in commercial production since the late 1860s and was familiar enough in northern kitchens to be called for by brand name with no explanation at all.