Boiled Eggs
Have ready a saucepan containing boiling water. Carefully put in with a spoon the number of eggs desired. Remove pan to back of stove where the water will not boil, and cook eggs for 6 or 8 minutes if liked "soft boiled," or from 40 to 45 minutes if liked "hard boiled."
After removing "hard boiled" eggs from pan, they should be immediately plunged into cold water to prevent discoloration of yolks.
An off-the-boil method, which is why the times look so strange. The pan is pulled to the cool back of a coal range and the eggs set in water that is falling steadily below boiling.
- The hinge: water that never boilsThe whole recipe depends on the eggs cooking in water held below a boil, so the whites set gently instead of toughening. On a gas or electric hob, bring the water to a boil, add the eggs, then cut the heat to the lowest setting that keeps the water at a bare shiver, around 180-190F.
- Why 40 to 45 minutesThat is not a hard boil in the modern sense. In water held below boiling, and steadily cooling at the far end of the range, an egg needs far longer to firm the yolk through. At a true rolling boil the same egg is hard through in 10 to 12 minutes and will turn rubbery and sulphurous if left much past that.
- Soft-boiled, 6 to 8 minutesThis figure is closer to modern practice but still assumes slack water. At a full boil, six minutes gives a set white and a jammy yolk and eight is close to firm; in barely simmering water expect a looser white at the six-minute mark.
- Putting the eggs in with a spoonNot fussiness. Lowering each egg rather than dropping it keeps the shell from cracking against the pan bottom, and cold eggs straight from the refrigerator crack more readily than eggs at room or larder temperature. Let them sit out twenty minutes first, or add them to water that is not yet at a full boil.
- The cold plungeCorrect and worth keeping. Chilling immediately stops the cooking and prevents the grey-green ring of iron sulphide at the yolk's edge, which the book calls discolouration. It also loosens the shell for peeling.
- Egg sizeEggs of this period were ungraded and varied more in size than a modern large egg. If you are working from the shorter soft-boiled time, add thirty seconds or so for a jumbo egg.
Cookbooks of the early twentieth century were often written for a woman setting up her first kitchen with no one at her elbow, which is why a book will spend a paragraph on boiled eggs at all. The instruction to move the pan "to back of stove" places it in the age of the coal or wood range, which had a hot firebox end and a cooler far end, where moving a pot was how a cook adjusted heat before a dial existed; such ranges remained in use for decades, so the phrase dates the page only loosely. The technique of holding eggs in water below the boil is the ancestor of what is now sold as a coddled or slow-cooked egg, and cookery writers of the period, Fannie Farmer among them, recommended cooking eggs below boiling and called the result more digestible than eggs boiled hard.