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Boiled Eggs
The following general rules for boiling eggs are useful:
Be sure the eggs are fresh beyond suspicion. Limed or cold storage eggs may be used in other ways but are not satisfactory boiled.
To Put Eggs to Boil-Have ready a saucepan or shallow kettle of boiling water; put each egg in gently with a spoon, allowing the spoon to touch the bottom of the pan before withdrawing it, so as to prevent the egg from dropping and cracking.
Time-For very soft boiled eggs, two minutes; soft boiled, three minutes; medium soft, three and three-fourths to four minutes; hard, six or seven minutes is the general time, but it is said that if boiled forty-five minutes the yolk of the egg will be mealy and perfectly digestible. Extra large eggs require an extra one-half minute. Eggs boiled for salad should be boiled fifteen minutes and then cooled in a basin of water to shrink the meat from the shell. Roll them on the table under the hand to crackle the shells which will then peel off very easily.
BOILED EGGS: MOST NUTRITIOUS METHODS-There are two methods of cooking eggs considered superior to the ordinary method of boiling. They are as follows:
First Method-Place the eggs in a saucepan of cold water and when the water boils the eggs are done; this will take about ten minutes. Second Method-For six eggs use a vessel that will hold two quarts. Fill it with boiling water, cover it closely, and stand it in a warm place for ten minutes.
For one or two eggs keep in hot water for only five minutes. In this way the eggs will be cooked equally well in every part. If the eggs are desired more thoroughly done, let them stand in the hot water ten or even twenty minutes longer, but not on the range Serve in a folded napkin.
POACHED (OR DROPPED) EGGS-Break the eggs one at a time, into a saucer. Place water in a saucepan, salt 't well, and when it is simmering, drop each egg lightly in, cooking but one egg at a time if the saucepan is small. More may be cooked at once by using a large frying-pan. Some cooks set muffin-rings in the water to give the egg an even shape, poaching them inside the rings. An egg-poacher is very convenient for this work. A spoonful of vinegar in the water will keep the eggs from spreading. With a small spoon throw the water carefully on the top of each egg to whiten it. The beauty of a poached egg is for the yolk to be seen blushing through the white, which should be just sufficiently hardened to form a veil for the yolk. When cooked enough, take out the egg with a perforated ladle, trim off the ragged edges, and slip it on a small, thin piece of buttered toast. When all the eggs are cooked and placed on their separate pieces of toast, place on each a bit of butter and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Poached eggs are often placed in beef soup, one egg being prepared for each person at table. They are also served on thin slices of boiled ham, and also on a Welsh rarebit. Delmonico, when serving poached eggs on toast, sprinkles sorrel over the top.
This is a set of general rules rather than a single dish, and most of it still holds. A few of the timings and one of the digestibility claims belong firmly to 1911.
- Timings start from boiling waterAll the stated times assume the egg goes into water already at a rolling boil and stays there. Two to three minutes gives a barely set white; six to seven minutes gives a firm but still slightly translucent yolk. Egg sizes were not standardised as they are now, so treat the numbers as a starting point -- the book itself allows an extra half-minute for extra large eggs.
- The forty-five minute eggThe claim that three-quarters of an hour makes the yolk "mealy and perfectly digestible" reflects a period fixation on digestibility, not on flavour. It produces a chalky, sulphurous, grey-green yolk. There is no nutritional reason to do it.
- Eggs for saladFifteen minutes is four or five minutes longer than needed and gives the grey-green ring where yolk meets white. Ten to twelve minutes off the boil, then straight into cold water, sets the yolk fully without the discolouration.
- Fresh eggs peel badlyThe instruction to use eggs "fresh beyond suspicion" fights the instruction to peel them for salad. Very fresh eggs cling to their shells; eggs a week or two old peel cleanly. Save the freshest for soft boiling and poaching, where the white holds together, and use older ones when you need to shell them.
- Limed and cold storage eggsBefore reliable refrigeration, eggs were preserved in limewater or waterglass for months. That treatment leaves a stale flavour that soft boiling exposes at once, hence the warning. The modern equivalent of the caution is simply to check the date.
- The second method is coddlingStanding eggs in a covered vessel of boiling water off the heat is genuine slow-set cooking: the white firms gently and never turns rubbery. Use a heavy pan with a lid and do not shortcut the two-quart volume for six eggs, since the water has to carry all the heat.
- PoachingSimmering, not boiling, is the whole trick. The spoonful of vinegar the book calls for helps the white gather. Whether heavy salting helps or hinders the white is disputed, so salt the water lightly and season on the plate. Muffin rings are optional.
- SorrelDelmonico's finish is presumably fresh sorrel, shredded fine, though the book does not say in what form. Its sharpness works the way lemon does against a soft yolk. It turns up at farmers' markets in spring.
- Serving"Serve in a folded napkin" most likely means the eggs go to table in their shells, wrapped to hold the heat. The book allows one poached egg per person when they are served in beef soup.
Butterick published this book as an adjunct to its pattern and magazine business, aimed at the household that ran without a professional cook, and the tone here is characteristic: rules first, dishes second. The preoccupation with digestibility runs through American cookery writing of the period, when eggs were held to be either the perfect invalid food or a dangerous burden on the stomach depending on how they were cooked. The warning about limed and cold storage eggs is of a kind that recurs in American cookery writing across several decades: mechanical cold storage was new enough to be distrusted, and preserving eggs in limewater or sodium silicate was still ordinary domestic practice. The nod to Delmonico's is a small piece of borrowed prestige, the New York restaurant being a standard reference for refinement in American cookbooks.