Egg Butter
Boil a pint of molasses slowly about fifteen or twenty minutes, stirring to prevent burning, add three eggs well beaten, stirring them in as fast as possible, boil a few minutes longer, partially cool, and flavor to taste with lemon. - Mrs. Colbert, Broadway.
A Southern sorghum-and-egg spread of the sort kept in a crock for biscuits. It is really a molasses custard cooked at candy-syrup temperature, and the whole thing turns on how the eggs go in.
- The hinge: temper or you get sweet scrambled eggsBeaten eggs hitting boiling molasses will set into threads in seconds, which is why the original says "as fast as possible." Whisk a ladle of the hot molasses into the eggs first, then pour that back into the pan in a thin stream, whisking hard.
- Molasses, not sorghum blackstrapThe book's "molasses" in a Dixie context is most often sorghum syrup or a light cane molasses. Modern blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral than what was meant; use light or full-flavor unsulphured molasses, or sorghum if you can get it.
- A pint is two cupsTwo cups of molasses is the whole of the sugar side of this recipe.
- What the first boil is doingFifteen to twenty minutes of slow boiling drives off water and concentrates the syrup; it is the step that decides final thickness. Molasses scorches readily, so keep the heat low, use a heavy pan, and stir into the corners.
- The second boil is shortOnce the eggs are in, only a few minutes is enough to thicken and cook them through. Cooked longer, the custard is liable to go grainy.
- If it curdles anywayA blitz with an immersion blender while still hot may smooth a slightly curdled mixture, though it will not undo eggs that have already set into firm curds.
- Flavoring with lemon"Flavor to taste" here most likely means lemon extract, added off the heat so the alcohol carrier does not cook away. A teaspoon of extract, or the grated zest of one lemon plus a tablespoon of juice, both work; the acid cuts the flatness of the molasses.
- StorageThis is not a shelf-stable preserve — it contains cooked egg. Refrigerate it and use within a week or two.
"Butter" here follows the old preserving usage seen in apple butter and pear butter: any fruit or syrup boiled down until it is thick enough to spread, no dairy involved. Egg butter belongs to the sorghum belt of the upland South and Appalachia, where cane sugar was expensive but every farm pressed sorghum in the fall and kept hens, and it was eaten on hot biscuits at breakfast. Some regional versions are associated with Easter, when eggs were plentiful, though that link is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance in The Dixie Cook-Book (1883), credited to a named contributor with a street address, is typical of the compiled community cookbooks of the period — the recipe is a household's working shorthand, printed as received, assuming a cook who already knew what boiled molasses should look like.