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Pickled Eggs
Put twenty eggs into a net, then into a saucepan with more than enough boiling water to cover them, and boil for thirty minutes; then plunge them into cold water, remove the shells, and put them into a jar. Pour six breakfast cupfuls of brown vinegar into a saucepan; add half an ounce each of bruised mace, white ginger, coriander seeds, cardamons and cloves, and ten chillies, also one ounce of sugar, and boil for a few minutes. Let the pickle get cold, pour it over the eggs, and cover over.
A straightforward spiced vinegar pickle, but two things in it need rethinking: the boiling time and the storage.
- Thirty minutes is far too longEggs boiled half an hour develop a green-grey ring at the yolk and a rubbery white with a sulphurous smell. Ten to twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives a firm yolk that still slices cleanly and takes the pickle well.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, usually reckoned at somewhere around 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so six cupfuls is roughly 1.4 to 1.7 litres of vinegar. Twenty peeled eggs plus that much liquid will need a jar considerably larger than two quarts.
- Brown vinegarThis generally means malt vinegar, the usual pickling vinegar in books of this period. Ordinary cider vinegar is the closest widely available substitute; use one at 5 percent acidity and do not dilute it.
- The spicesHalf an ounce is about 14 g of each. "White ginger" is dried peeled ginger root, bruised rather than ground; "cardamons" are whole green cardamom pods, lightly crushed. Ten chillies means small dried red ones, and ten of them makes a genuinely hot pickle -- three or four is plenty for most palates.
- Let the pickle get coldThis instruction is doing real work. Hot vinegar toughens the outer layer of the whites and turns them chalky. Boil the spices, cool the liquid to room temperature, then pour.
- The netA muslin or cheesecloth bag holds the eggs together so they can be lifted out of the water all at once without knocking against each other. A steamer basket does the same job.
- StoragePeeled eggs are dense and the vinegar takes time to penetrate to the centre, so a jar of these should be kept in the refrigerator rather than in a larder, whatever the original assumes. Current food-safety guidance for home-pickled eggs is refrigeration throughout, and use within about three to four months.
- Timing and yieldTwenty eggs fills a large jar and serves a crowd as a bar snack. Give them at least two weeks before eating; the spice flavour is thin before then and settles at around a month.
Pickled eggs belong to the English public-house tradition rather than to haute cuisine -- a jar on the counter beside the pickled onions and the cockles, keeping cheaply and salting the drinker's thirst. The spice list here, with mace, coriander, cardamom, cloves and chillies in malt vinegar, is a spiced vinegar in the British pickling manner, though cardamom and coriander are not part of the usual mixture. The instruction to bag the eggs in a net before boiling is a professional habit, useful when you are cooking twenty at a time and want them all out of the water at the same moment.