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To Preserve Eggs
Mrs. G. Wyllie.
One pint salt, two pints fresh lime, three gallons water; mix well and put in eggs without cracking the shell ; well and put in eggs without cracking the shell; they must be kept covered with the brine.
This is a pre-refrigeration storage method rather than a dish, and it is the one class of egg handling that does not translate. The points below explain the terms and why the method fails a modern safety standard.
- "Fresh lime" is quicklime"Fresh lime" most likely means unslaked lime -- calcium oxide, sold in lumps for whitewash and mortar -- though some period sources use the phrase for lime freshly slaked. Quicklime slakes violently when water is added, heating and spitting caustic slurry, and is a chemical burn hazard to skin and especially eyes; either way it is not the food-grade slaked pickling lime sold today.
- Two pints of lime to three gallons is not a measured cureThe recipe gives no strength for the resulting solution, no check on it, no storage temperature and no keeping time. A preserving brine that is not specified and not verified cannot be relied on to do anything.
- Salmonella is the specific riskLimewater works by sealing the shell pores with a film of calcium carbonate, slowing moisture loss and gas exchange. It does not sterilise the egg and it does nothing to Salmonella enteritidis already inside a contaminated egg, which can multiply during long ambient storage.
- Cracked and washed shellsThe instruction not to crack the shell is the hinge of the original method: any flaw admits the alkaline liquid and the bacteria with it. Modern supermarket eggs are also washed, which strips the natural cuticle the technique depends on, so they behave nothing like the unwashed farm eggs Mrs. Wyllie had.
- What to do insteadRefrigeration at or below 40F does the same job better. If you want long-term storage of eggs, use a current tested method from a food-safety authority rather than this one.
Before mechanical refrigeration reached the domestic kitchen, a hen's spring and summer glut had to be carried through to winter somehow, and household books of the 1870s and 1880s often carry several competing schemes: packing in bran, salt or sawdust, greasing the shells with lard or butter, dipping in melted paraffin, or immersion in limewater or in sodium silicate, the "water glass" that came into wide commercial use. Limewater works on the same chemistry as a lime wash on a wall, the dissolved calcium hydroxide reacting with air to lay down a thin skin of chalk that plugs the pores of the shell. That The Home Cook Book prints it under a named contributor is typical of the volume, which was compiled from recipes solicited from subscribing ladies for charitable purposes and reproduced more or less as they arrived, garbled repeated line and all.