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Egg Salad
Cut eight cold, hard-boiled eggs in quarters and place in a bowl. Season with four tablespoons dressing, adding half teaspoon French mustard, mix well and serve.
Barely a recipe by modern standards, but the terms need translating and the proportions are worth pinning down.
- "Dressing"In a book of this vintage an unqualified "dressing" means either mayonnaise or a cooked boiled dressing thickened with egg and flour, not a bottled vinaigrette. Four tablespoons is a light coating for eight eggs; add more only after tasting.
- French mustardNot the bright yellow American condiment but a smooth Dijon-style prepared mustard. Half a teaspoon in this quantity is a background note rather than a flavour you can name.
- Hard-boiled eggsBring to a bare simmer, hold 9-11 minutes, then cool at once in cold water. The original assumes you already have cold eggs on hand, which is the point of a dish like this.
- Salt and pepperThe instruction to "season" stops at the dressing and mustard. Eight eggs need a good pinch of salt and a grind of pepper of their own, added after the dressing so you can judge the total.
- Quartered, not choppedCutting into quarters rather than dicing keeps the yolks intact and the salad looking like eggs. Fold gently with a spatula; vigorous mixing turns it into egg mayonnaise.
- Yield and servingEight eggs serve four as a first course or light lunch. Serve on lettuce leaves or with cress and thin bread and butter, and keep it cold until it goes to the table.
Egg salads of this kind belong to the era when a cold larder was a working part of the kitchen and hard-boiled eggs were a standing resource, ready for garnishing, stuffing, slicing into aspics or dressing on their own. The brevity here is characteristic of professional compilations, which assumed the reader already had a bowl of mayonnaise or boiled dressing made up and needed only the proportions. The call for "French mustard" reflects the authority French terms and French condiments carried in English-language kitchens of the period, and specifying it distinguished the dish from plainer household cookery.