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Boiled Eggs
The eggs should be warm before boiling; that is, they should not be brought from a cold place and boiled Plunge them into boiling water and boil gently for three minutes, when the yolks will be soft and the whites a little hardened. The whites will become quite hard if boiled for exactly five minutes while the yolks will remain soft; if boiled for three or four minutes longer they will be quite hard. For salads, they require to be boiled for a quarter of an hour. If the eggs are very cold, as they are likely to be in the winter, they can be warmed sufficiently by holding them in steam If the shell of an egg should be cracked, prick small holes in the thickest part of the egg to prevent the contents from oozing out while boiling.
Eggs, Bonne Femme Peel two onions, slice and fry brown in butter; then mix in one dessertspoonful of vinegar. Butter a dish, spread the onions over it, break over them the required number of eggs, and place them in a brisk oven. When the eggs are cooked, cover them with a layer of breadcrumbs fried in butter, and serve.
Eggs, Bourgeoise Style Cut some thin slices of bread, trim off the crusts, lay them on a thickly-buttered dish, and cover with thin slices of cheese. Beat well sufficient eggs to cover the bread, season with salt, pepper and grated nutmeg, and pour them over the slices. Put the dish in a moderate oven, and bake until the eggs are set. Serve while very hot, in the same dish.
Three items in one entry: a timing table for eggs in the shell, and two baked egg dishes in the French domestic idiom. The timings are the part that needs the most adjustment.
- The fifteen-minute salad eggA quarter of an hour in boiling water gives a chalky yolk with a grey-green ring at its edge, the result of iron and sulphur reacting under prolonged heat. Ten to twelve minutes off the boil, then straight into cold water, gives a firm yolk that slices cleanly for salad without the sulphurous smell.
- Three minutes is for small eggsThree minutes suits a smaller egg -- eggs of the period ran on average smaller than a modern large or extra-large, though sizes varied and no size is stated here. For a large supermarket egg you may want roughly thirty seconds more at each stage, and expect the three-minute egg to have a barely-set white.
- Warming the eggs firstThe recipe gives no reason, but there is a good one: a cold egg dropped into boiling water is more likely to crack from thermal shock. Letting them stand out for twenty minutes does the job; the steam trick works but risks starting to cook the shell-side white.
- Cracked shellsPricking a cracked egg is period practice and not worth following. A shell that is already broken has had a route in for bacteria, and the egg should be discarded rather than patched.
- "Brisk oven"For the Bonne Femme eggs, roughly 400-425F on the usual period equivalences. The eggs want to set fast around the onions rather than slowly weep liquid; a shallow buttered gratin dish helps.
- "Moderate oven"For the Bourgeoise eggs, 350F. Bake until the custard is just set in the centre, around 25-30 minutes depending on depth. Carried further it curdles and water separates out under the bread.
- DessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons. It is a real Victorian measure sitting between the teaspoon and the tablespoon, not a loose instruction.
- Quantities and yieldNeither baked dish specifies numbers. As a starting point, two onions and two teaspoons of vinegar will carry six to eight eggs for four people; for the bourgeoise version allow roughly one slice of bread and one and a half eggs per person, with about 2 oz cheese for four.
Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel who signed himself "Oscar of the Waldorf", published his enormous Cook Book in 1896, and its egg chapter reads like a catalogue of the French classical repertoire as it was practised in a large American hotel kitchen. The two dish names are class labels rather than place names: bonne femme, "good wife", and à la bourgeoise, "in the middle-class manner", both signalled in nineteenth-century French menu language that a preparation was homely — onions, breadcrumbs, cheese — as against the truffled and glazed à la financière or à la royale. That such plain things appear at all in a Waldorf book is perhaps a reminder that grand hotels may have fed staff, invalids and early breakfasts as well as banquets. The opening timing table also reflects a period when eggs came from the larder or the cellar rather than a refrigerator, which is why the first instruction is about temperature rather than time.