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Stuffed Eggs in a Nest
Cut "hard-boiled" eggs in halves lengthwise. Remove yolks, and put whites aside in pairs. Mash yolks, and add half the amount of devilled ham and enough melted butter to make of consistency to shape. Make in balls size of original yolks, and refill whites. Form remainder of mixture into a nest. Arrange eggs in the nest, and pour over one cup White Sauce I. Sprinkle with buttered crumbs, and bake until crumbs are brown.
A hot dish built from cold components, so the baking is only about heating through and browning the top. Everything hinges on keeping that stage short.
- Do not overbakeThe eggs are already cooked; long baking turns the whites tough and rubbery and can break the sauce. The recipe gives no temperature or time: bake only until the crumbs colour, which in a hot oven is a matter of minutes.
- White Sauce IIn this book that is the lighter of the graded white sauces: roughly equal spoonfuls of butter and flour to a cup of milk, seasoned with salt and a little pepper. Check the book's own proportions before scaling. Cook the roux a minute before adding milk so the sauce does not taste of raw flour.
- Devilled hamCanned potted ham seasoned with mustard and cayenne, sold in small tins and still available. Any finely minced cooked ham worked to a paste with mustard, a pinch of cayenne and a little butter will stand in.
- "Half the amount"Best read as half the volume of the mashed yolks. The recipe does not say how many eggs; if you use six, the yolks come to something like 1/3 to 1/2 cup, so two to four tablespoons of devilled ham.
- Buttered crumbsSoft bread crumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly 1 cup crumbs to 2 tablespoons butter. Dry commercial crumbs brown too fast and stay sandy.
- The nestYou need a shallow buttered baking dish just large enough to hold the halves in one layer. Spread the leftover yolk mixture as a ring or bed and settle the filled whites into it; it will not hold a sculpted shape once the sauce goes on.
- PeelingOlder eggs peel more cleanly than very fresh ones. Cut with a thin wet blade and the yolks lift out whole.
- YieldSix eggs, twelve halves, serves three or four at lunch or supper with bread and a salad.
Fannie Farmer's egg chapter is full of dishes like this one: a way of turning cold larder items and a cup of white sauce into something hot enough to be called a course. "Devilled" had meant highly seasoned with mustard and cayenne since the early nineteenth century, and by the time this book appeared devilled ham came ready-made in small tins, a product generally traced to the Boston canning trade of the 1860s and 70s. That tin is the point of the recipe. The Boston Cooking School taught a domestic cookery that assumed a shelf of reliable manufactured staples, and much of the book's method consists of binding them together with a measured white sauce and browning the top under crumbs. The "nest" is simply the presentation flourish, the same impulse that produced eggs served in rings of mashed potato or duchesse borders on a platter.