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Scrambled Eggs, with Cream
Prepare the same amount of scrambled eggs, but adding half gill cream in place of the milk just before beating up the eggs in the bowl.
A one-line variation that assumes you have the book's basic scrambled eggs in front of you: the change is cream instead of milk, stirred in before the eggs are beaten. Everything else depends on the parent recipe.
- Half a gillA gill is 4 fluid ounces, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces, about 1/4 cup (an imperial gill is 5 fl oz, so half would be 2 1/2). The recipe does not say how many eggs are involved; that depends entirely on the parent recipe.
- What "cream" meantEarly twentieth-century cream sold for table use ran roughly 18-20 percent fat, close to modern light cream or half-and-half. Heavy whipping cream at 36 percent will give a noticeably richer, looser curd; use a lighter cream if you want the original texture.
- The point of the substitutionFat coats the protein and slows coagulation, so cream-scrambled eggs set into softer, smaller curds than milk-scrambled ones. The trade-off is that they also look wetter, and can be mistaken for underdone.
- Heat is the hingeCream buys you a little margin, but not much. Keep the pan at low to medium-low and pull the eggs while they still look slightly loose — carryover heat finishes them off the burner.
- Add it before beatingThe cream goes in before the eggs are beaten, so it is dispersed through them rather than stirred in later; whether the wording reflects a deliberate technical choice is not stated.
Books of this kind were written as chains of variations: a base preparation followed by a series of one-line derivatives — with cream, with ham, with tomatoes — which is also how the classical French repertoire was catalogued. Cream in place of milk was an easy enrichment for any household with a dairy delivery, since the cream in question was ordinary table cream rather than anything specialized.