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Egg Dishes: Ingredients
No. 202. Uova ripiene (Canapés of Egg) Ingredients: Eggs, butter, salt, pepper, nutmeg, cheese, parsley, mushrooms, Béchamel and Espagnole sauce, stock.
No.201. Uovaal Pomidoro (Eggs and Tomatoes) Ingredients: Eggs, salt, tomatoes, onion, parsley, butter, pepper.
Boil as many eggs as you want hard, and cut them in half lengthwise; take out the yolks and mix them with some fresh butter, salt, pepper, very little nutmeg, grated cheese, a little chopped parsley, and cooked mushrooms also chopped. Then mix two tablespoonsful of good Béchamel sauce (No. 3) with the raw yolk of one or two eggs and add it to the rest. Put all in a saucepan with an ounce of butter and good stock, then fill up the white halves with the mixture, giving them a good shape; heat them in a bain-marie, and serve with a very good clear Espagnole sauce (No. 1).
Two entries have run together on this page: No. 202, the stuffed eggs, is complete, while No. 201 (eggs and tomatoes) survives here only as its ingredient line, its method lost to the compositor. What follows applies to the stuffed eggs.
- What the dish actually isDespite the name, these are not canapés on toast but hard-boiled eggs halved lengthwise and refilled with a bound yolk mixture, then warmed through. Serve two halves per person as a first course, four halves as a light lunch dish.
- The hinge: keep the filling stiffThe stock and butter seem to be there to loosen the yolks enough to pipe or spoon, and no more; the recipe gives no quantity for the stock. Add it a little at a time; a filling that slumps out of the whites cannot be given "a good shape".
- An ounce of butterTwo tablespoons, plus whatever "some fresh butter" you worked into the yolks first — reckon another tablespoon for six eggs.
- The raw yolkIt binds the B he filling heats. Heat the filling through gently but thoroughly, and use very fresh eggs.
- Bain-marieA shallow dish standing in a pan of hot, not boiling, water. Direct heat will toughen the whites and split the filling.
- The two saucesBéchamel here is the classic milk-and-roux sauce; Espagnole is a brown stock sauce built on a browned roux and reduced with mirepoix, and it is a long job. A well-reduced brown gravy or a jus lié stands in without embarrassment, but the book expects the real thing.
- Mushrooms and nutmeg"Cooked mushrooms" means sautéed dry in butter until they stop releasing liquid — wet mushrooms will thin the filling. Nutmeg at "very little" means a scrape, perhaps an eighth of a teaspoon for six eggs; it should not be identifiable.
- PeelingTwelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water. Eggs boiled hard and left to cool in the pan are grey at the yolk and grip their shells.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) by Mrs W. G. Waters is an Italian cookery book dressed as a Boccaccian frame story: a house party of ten, with menus for ten days and the recipes numbered in a separate section, from which this page comes. The Italian titles sit oddly with the sauces — uova ripiene is straightforward domestic Italian for "stuffed eggs", and Waters finishes it with Béchamel and Espagnole and calls it a canapé, which is the grammar of the French professional kitchen that dominated Anglophone cookbooks around 1900. That mixture is the book's real subject: Italian food explained to English readers who had been taught that respectable cooking was French.