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Buttered Eggs, or Egg Toast
1122. Beat four or five eggs, yolk and white together; put a quarter of a pound of butter in a basin, and then put it in boiling water, stirring it till melted; pour the butter and eggs into a saucepan; keep a basin in the hand, just holding the saucepan in the other, over a slow part of the fire, shaking it one way as it begins to warm; pour it into the basin and back; then hold it again over the fire, alternately stirring it constantly in the saucepan, and pouring it into the basin, more perfectly to mix the egg and butter, until they shall be hot without boiling. Serve on toasted bread, or in a basin, to eat with salt fish or red herrings.
SCOTCH Ecas. 1123. Boil hard five pullets' eggs, and, without removing the white, cover completely with a fine relishing forcemeat, in which let scraped ham or chopped anchovy bear a due proportion. Fry of a beautiful yellow brown, and serve with a good gravy in the dish.
An early scrambled-egg method, built on a butter-to-egg ratio far richer than modern practice, with the pouring back and forth between pan and bowl acting as the temperature control.
- The hingeThe eggs must get hot without ever simmering. Once any part of the mixture boils the butter breaks out and the egg sets in curds; the constant transfer between saucepan and basin exists purely to bleed off heat before that happens.
- BasinA basin here is simply a mixing bowl.
- Melting the butter"Put it in boiling water" means stand the bowl of butter in hot water, not add water to the butter. A quarter of a pound is 115 g, about a stick.
- Proportions115 g of butter to four or five eggs gives something closer to a rich sauce than to breakfast eggs. Halving the butter produces a recognisable soft scramble; keeping it full gives the loose, spoonable texture the recipe intends.
- "A slow part of the fire"On a range, the lowest setting, and lift the pan clear of the burner whenever it feels warm to the hand. A heatproof bowl over barely steaming water is the modern equivalent and is more forgiving.
- ServingFour or five eggs feed two as a supper dish on toast, or four as an accompaniment. The pairing with salt fish or red herrings — heavily salted, smoked herring — means the eggs themselves are left unsalted or only lightly seasoned.
Buttered eggs is the older English name for what became scrambled eggs. Serving it against salt fish or red herrings places it in the nineteenth-century breakfast and supper repertoire, where cured fish was cheap, keenly salty everyday food and wanted a bland, fatty foil. The instruction to work between saucepan and basin is a pre-thermostat technique: with an open fire offering no fine control of heat, the cook could control temperature by moving the food instead.