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Battered or Scrambled Eggs
In a frying-pan, place one tablespoon of butter for each egg to be used. Beat the eggs until the whites and yolks are well mixed. Season with salt and pepper and add one to three tablespoons of milk or cream for each egg. Pour into the hot fat and cook slowly, stirring constantly until the eggs are of the desired consistency. Serve at once. A little onion-juice or chopped parsley may be added to the eggs, if desired. Eggs cooked in this way in the top of a double boiler will be more creamy than those cooked in a frying-pan.
A plain scrambled egg method that holds up well, with two proportions that a modern cook will want to scale back.
- Butter, reconsideredA tablespoon of butter per egg is considerably more than most modern cooks use. A tablespoon total for three or four eggs is enough in a nonstick or well-seasoned pan.
- Milk or creamOne to three tablespoons per egg is a wide range, and the top of it will loosen the curd into something closer to a wet custard. A teaspoon to a tablespoon per egg gives soft curds that still hold; skip the liquid entirely if you want a firmer set.
- "Cook slowly" is the hingeThe whole difference between creamy and squeaky eggs is heat. Keep the pan at low or medium-low, move the eggs constantly, and pull them from the heat while they still look slightly underdone -- carryover finishes them in the time it takes to reach the plate.
- The double boilerThe closing line is the best advice in the recipe. The water bath keeps the heat gentle and even, though eggs can still overcook if the water is at a hard boil; the tradeoff is time -- roughly 8 to 12 minutes of near-constant stirring for a few eggs against two or three in a pan.
- Onion-juiceGrated onion pressed through a sieve or squeezed in cheesecloth, a standby flavoring in this period. A quarter teaspoon per three eggs is plenty; a pinch of onion powder is the modern shortcut, though it lacks the fresh bite.
- Salt timingThe recipe salts the beaten eggs before cooking. Salting early is often said to give a slightly looser, more tender curd, while some cooks salt at the end for a tighter set; either works.
- YieldThe original gives none. Two to three eggs per person for a breakfast serving, so a six-egg batch feeds two to three.
"Battered" here is often said to be the older participle of beating eggs to a batter, and its pairing with "scrambled" in the title suggests the two names were still competing in American kitchens; scrambled is the name that survives. The recipes tend to be short, unfussy and pitched at a cook working without much equipment. The recommendation of a double boiler reflects a real preoccupation of the era's cookery writing, which returned again and again to gentle, indirect heat as the mark of careful work -- the same reasoning that produced custards cooked over water and the fireless cooker.