Home › The World's Kitchen › Scrambled Eggs, En Surprise
Scrambled Eggs, En Surprise
Stick a needle in the thick, round end of eight fresh eggs, then carefully clip off a small piece at the thin ends. Shake out the inside of the eggs into a bowl, keeping both shells and covers. Season the eggs with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, pour in a half gill milk and beat up with a fork for one minute. Heat a tablespoon butter on a frying pan, pour in the beaten eggs, stir well with a wooden spoon for two minutes, let rest for one minute, then stir again while cooking for three minutes. Prepare six small, round toasts of one and a half inches in diameter and cut out a small, round piece in the centre of each. Place them on a dish with a folded napkin, then fill the six shells with scrambled eggs, set the eggshells on the cavity of the toasts, cover them with their covers and serve.
A parlour trick more than a technique: the eggs are scrambled softly and served back inside their own shells, standing in cut-out toast rounds. The work is all in the shells, and it is worth doing them slowly.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup — about 1 1/2 tablespoons per three eggs, which is generous. Use less if you want firmer curds.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is 1/2 teaspoon. That is a lot of pepper for eight eggs; start with half and taste.
- Opening the shellsThe needle is there to vent the round end so the contents will drain from the small hole you clip at the point. Tap and pick the thin end away with the tip of a knife rather than cracking it, and work over a bowl — a lost "cover" means a lost serving. Do a couple of spares.
- Rinse and scald the shellsRaw shell surfaces can carry Salmonella, and here the shell becomes the serving vessel. Rinse the emptied shells and covers, then pour boiling water through them and stand them upside down to drain before filling.
- Standing the shells upThe hole cut in each toast round is a socket, not decoration. Cut it slightly narrower than the shell's widest point so the egg sits without wobbling; an apple corer or a small piping tip works. Egg cups or a rice-filled dish will do the same job if the toast fights you.
- The six minutes of stirringThe six minutes on the pan -- Two minutes stirring, a minute's rest, three more stirring is a long time for eight eggs and only makes sense over gentle heat. Keep the pan low and pull the eggs while they still look a little loose — they will carry on setting in the warm shells.
- YieldEight eggs are emptied but only six shells are filled. Serves six as a first course or three at breakfast.
This belongs to the long tradition of en surprise cookery — a dish disguised as something else, or returned to a container it appears never to have left — which ran through French restaurant and hotel service from the mid-nineteenth century into the early twentieth. Cookbooks of the period collected that professional repertoire for a home audience, and the folded napkin is a general service convention of the dining room. The same impulse produced the eggshell serving of other dishes, and the once-common practice of piping potato back into its own skin. Nothing about it improves the eggs; the point is that the guest picks up what looks like an intact boiled egg, lifts the top, and finds it already scrambled.