Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › To Preserve Eggs (II)
To Preserve Eggs (II)
Mrs. Midgley.
Take a patent pailful of spring water, pour it into a stone jar, take one pound of lime, one pint of Liverpool salt ; let it stand for three days, stir it every day, then pour it off, and put in your eggs.
This is a lime-water egg preserve of the kind kept in nearly every nineteenth-century cellar, and it is worth reading for what it tells you about the pre-refrigeration household rather than for use. Several things in it do not translate.
- The lime is quicklimeThe lime is almost certainly quicklime -- "One pound of lime" in a recipe of this kind means unslaked lime (calcium oxide), not garden lime or the fruit. Added to water it slakes violently, heats, and produces a strongly caustic solution capable of burning skin and eyes. That alkaline solution is what does the preserving, and the caustic slaking is why this belongs in the history books rather than the kitchen.
- Eggs are never brought to a safe temperatureThe eggs go into the jar raw and stay raw, held at cellar temperature for weeks or months. Any Salmonella already inside the egg is not killed by the lime, which acts on the shell surface and on gas exchange through the pores.
- Modern eggs are not the same eggsCommercially sold eggs in North America are washed and sanitized, which strips the natural cuticle that lime preserving relies on. An egg with no cuticle sitting in ambient storage behaves very differently from a just-laid, unwashed farm egg of 1877.
- A "patent pailful" is not a measurementA patent pail was a manufactured tin or galvanized bucket, but the recipe assumes you own the same one Mrs. Midgley did. The lime-to-water ratio, which governs how caustic the solution ends up, is therefore genuinely undefined.
- Liverpool saltCoarse salt shipped in barrels from Liverpool, widely used for curing and dairy work in the period. A pint is a volume, not a weight, and coarse crystals pack unpredictably.
- No test, no endpointThe recipe gives no way to judge whether an egg has spoiled after storage, no keeping time, and no temperature for the cellar. Curing and preserving procedures without those three things cannot be assessed for safety. If you want to keep eggs at length, use a current tested method.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from recipes contributed by named women of the city and beyond, which is why so many entries carry a signature like Mrs. Midgley's rather than an author's voice — the book was sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, and the contributors' names were part of its appeal. Preserving eggs mattered because hens are seasonal layers: they flood the household with eggs in spring and early summer and largely stop in the cold, so June's surplus had to be carried through to January. Lime water, along with the later waterglass (sodium silicate) solution, was the standard answer, sealing the shell's pores against air and bacteria. Cookbooks of the era print half a dozen competing versions, this being the second in the series here — evidence less of a settled technique than of every household having its own proportions and swearing by them.