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Egg Dishes: Parmesan
No. 203. Uova alla Fiorentina (Eggs) Ingredients: Eggs, butter, Parmesan, cream, flour, salt, pepper, curds.
Boil as many eggs as you require hard, then cut them in half and take out the yolks and pound them in a mortar with equal quantities of butter and curds, a tablespoonful of grated Parmesan, salt and pepper. Put this in a saucepan and add the yolks of eight eggs and the white of one (this is for twelve people), mix all well together and reduce a little. With this mixture fill the hard whites of the eggs and spread the rest of the sauce on the bottom of the dish, and on this place the whites. Then in another saucepan mix half a gill of cream and an ounce of butter, a dessert-spoonful of flour, salt, and pepper; let this boil for a minute, and then glaze over the eggs in the dish with it, and on the top of each egg put a little bit of butter, and over all a powdering of grated cheese. Put this in the oven, pass the salamander over the top, and when the cheese is coloured serve at once.
No. 204. Uova in fili (Egg Canapés) Ingredients: Eggs, butter, mushrooms, onions, flour, white wine, fish or meat stock, salt, pepper, croûtons of bread.
Put into a saucepan two ounces of butter, three large fresh mushrooms cut into fillets, and an onion cut up, fry them slightly, and when the onion begins to colour add a spoonful of flour, a quarter of a glass of Chablis, salt and pepper, and occasionally add a spoonful of either fish or meat stock. Let this simmer for half an hour, so as to reduce it to a thick sauce.
Then boil as many eggs as you want hard; take out the yolks, but keep them whole.
Cut up the whites into slices, and add them to the above sauce, pour the sauce into a dish, and on the top of it place the whole yolks of egg, each on a croûton of bread.
Two stuffed-egg preparations from the Italian chapters: one baked and gratinéed, one served cold-ish over fried bread with a mushroom sauce. Both are written for a cook who is expected to fill in the obvious, and both scale awkwardly, so read the quantities before you shop.
- The yield is buried in the textRecipe 203 says the eight extra yolks are "for twelve people," which implies roughly a dozen boiled eggs halved, plus eight more eggs broken for the filling. For four people, use four boiled eggs and about three extra yolks with a bare spoonful of the white.
- CurdsNot cottage cheese in the modern supermarket sense. Use whole-milk ricotta, drained an hour in a sieve, or a fresh farmer's cheese. Anything wet will loosen the filling and it will run out of the whites.
- A gillIn an English book of this date a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, so half a gill of cream is about 2½ fl oz. With an ounce of butter and a dessertspoon (about 2 teaspoons) of flour, that makes a very thick, small quantity of béchamel — enough to glaze, not to sauce. Loosen with milk if it will not spread.
- The hinge: reduce gently"Add the yolks of eight eggs... mix all well together and reduce a little" means warm the mixture over low heat until it thickens to a piping consistency. Over direct heat it will scramble in seconds; a bowl over simmering water is safer and the texture stays smooth.
- Oven and salamanderThe book gives no temperature; a moderate oven is enough to heat the dish through, then finish under a broiler set high, close to the element, for a minute or two. The salamander was a heated iron plate held over the surface for exactly this browning job.
- Hard-boiled whites that stay wholeEleven to twelve minutes for large eggs, then straight into cold water. Older eggs peel more cleanly, and a halved egg with a torn white will not hold a filling.
- Chablis and stock in No. 204"A quarter of a glass" is imprecise and depends on whether a wineglass or a tumbler is meant, so read it as anywhere from a large spoonful to a couple of fluid ounces. Any dry unoaked white will do. Fish stock points this toward a lean-day dish; meat stock makes it richer and is the better choice if you are serving it as a savoury.
- Keeping the yolks wholeFor No. 204 the yolks are the centrepiece, so cook the eggs no more than twelve minutes to avoid the grey ring, and lift the yolks out with a small spoon rather than squeezing the halves. The croûtons should be fried in butter and still crisp when the sauce goes on, so assemble at the table's edge.
- Mushrooms"Three large fresh mushrooms" in 1901 would most likely have meant field mushrooms, more flavourful than cultivated buttons, though cultivated mushrooms were also on sale by then. Use chestnut or portobello, and let them colour properly before the flour goes in.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) was Mrs. W. G. Waters's attempt to persuade English households that Italian cooking was worth attention, framed as ten days of dinners discussed by a house party — the Boccaccio conceit is the whole point of the title. These two dishes sit in the egg chapter, which in an Italian book of the period does double duty: eggs were the standard resource for meatless days in a Catholic country, and the mushroom sauce of No. 204 offers fish stock as an alternative to meat stock for exactly that reason. The name uova alla fiorentina has drifted since; in most modern usage it means eggs with spinach, but Waters attaches it here to a Parmesan and curd filling with no greenery at all, a reminder that regional dish names in this era were far less fixed than menu writers now assume. Uova in fili — literally eggs in threads — presumably refers to the sliced whites strewn through the sauce.