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Pickled Eggs
These make a nice accompaniment for broiled steak. Six eggs; one pint of vinegar; twenty-four whole cloves; one-half teaspoon of salt; one-half teaspoon of pepper; one-half teaspoon of ground mustard. Boil the eggs fifteen minutes, throw them into cold water. and when cool, remove the shells and stick four cloves into each egg. Put the vinegar on to boil, rub the mustard, salt and pepper to a paste with a tablespoon of the cold vinegar, and when the vinegar is boiling, add the paste to it and stir until the whole is well mixed. Put the eggs in a glass fruit-jar, pour the boiling vinegar over them, cover well and use after two weeks. For some tastes use half the quantity of cloves.
A straightforward spiced vinegar pickle from a period when a covered jar in a cool larder counted as storage. Two things need attention: where the jar lives, and how long the eggs boil.
- Keep them coldPickled eggs are not a shelf-stable preserve. The book's "cover well and use after two weeks" assumed a cold larder; modern guidance is that home-pickled eggs live in the refrigerator from the moment they are jarred and are eaten within a few months. A whole egg is dense and acid moves into the yolk slowly, so the interior cannot be relied on to be hostile to bacteria for some time.
- Fifteen minutes is too longThat boil is what produces the grey-green ring around the yolk and a bouncy white. Twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives a firm egg that still slices cleanly. The cold plunge in the original is worth keeping for its own sake, since it makes the shells release.
- Vinegar strengthA pint is two cups. Use a standard 5 per cent cider or white wine vinegar undiluted; anything sold as a mild or seasoned salad vinegar will be weaker and will not do the preserving work.
- Twenty-four clovesFour whole cloves pressed into each egg is assertive by current tastes, and the recipe itself offers the retreat. Two per egg, or six cloves loose in the jar, gives spice without the medicinal edge.
- Ground mustardThis is dry English or yellow mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. Rubbing it to a paste with cold vinegar before it meets the hot liquid is the standard trick for avoiding lumps.
- Fitting the jarSix peeled eggs need a jar they nearly fill. Use a tall pint-and-a-half or quart jar, and top up with more vinegar if the eggs are not submerged.
- The two-week waitThis is more likely about flavour penetration than preservation. The seasoning works inward from the surface over time, and the whites firm and take on colour.
- YieldSix eggs, halved, serve six as the relish the headnote describes, alongside grilled steak or cold meat.
Pickled eggs belong to the old larder economy, in which a spring glut of eggs was carried into leaner months by vinegar, isinglass or waterglass. By the time The Butterick Cook Book appeared, the preserving motive had largely given way to the appetising one: a sharp, spiced egg served as a relish beside broiled meat, in the same role as pickled walnuts or piccalilli. Pickled eggs are strongly associated with the British pub counter, though the clove-studding here is not documented as a specifically British trait; pressing whole cloves into the surface of a food rather than boiling them in the liquor is the same technique used on a baked ham. That the recipe sits in an egg chapter of a book published by a dress-pattern company is itself telling: Butterick sold household competence as a package, and a jar of pickled eggs was the sort of small, cheap, unglamorous thing a well-run kitchen was expected to have standing by.