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Boiled Eggs
Carefully drop twelve fresh eggs in boiling water and boil for three minutes. Lift them up with a skimmer, place on a hot dish with a folded napkin and serve, with six egg cups.
A three-line recipe with two variables the original leaves out: the temperature of the eggs going in, and how much water is in the pot. Both decide whether three minutes gives you a set white or a raw one.
- Three minutes assumes room-temperature eggsAn egg straight from the refrigerator needs roughly four to four and a half minutes for the same result, and even then the white next to the yolk may stay loose. Let them sit out for half an hour, or add a minute.
- Twelve eggs will stall the potA dozen cold eggs dropped into an ordinary saucepan knocks the water well off the boil, and the timing goes with it. Use at least four quarts of water, keep the heat high, and start counting only when it returns to a boil.
- Lower them, do not drop themThe instruction to "carefully drop" is doing a lot of work. A skimmer or a slotted spoon, one egg at a time, prevents cracked shells on the bottom of the pan.
- Serving as writtenSix egg cups for twelve eggs means two each, six diners. The folded napkin on the hot dish was probably practical as well as decorative: it would steady the eggs against rolling and hold some heat while they went round the table.
- Eating them softA three-minute egg has a fluid yolk and only a partly set white. Anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised should use pasteurised shell eggs, which are cooked the same way, though the white may set a little differently.
- Cracking the topServe with teaspoons. One common method is to strike the shell round the upper end and lift the cap off, which stops shell fragments falling into the yolk.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book in 1906 as an encyclopaedic reference covering thousands of preparations, which is why something as elementary as a boiled egg gets its own numbered entry. The detail that dates it is the equipment: egg cups and a folded napkin, which are often said to have been usual breakfast service in a household with a cook, the egg arriving upright in its shell to be opened at the table rather than shelled in the kitchen. Filippini's assumption of twelve eggs for six people is likewise generally taken as of its period, when a hotel or a well-off family's breakfast is said to have run to more than a single egg a head.