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Scrambled Eggs with Smoked Beef
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill milk, half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, and briskly beat up with a fork for one minute. Cut two ounces smoked beef in very thin slices, plunge them in a pint boiling water for three minutes, then drain on a sieve. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, drop in eggs, cook for three minutes, stirring meanwhile. Add beef and cook for three minutes, more, stirring briskly meanwhile, pour in deep hot dish and serve.
A plain plate of scrambled eggs with dried beef, written in the measurements of a professional kitchen around 1900. Two conversions and one timing adjustment cover almost everything.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces — 1/4 cup, which works out to about half a tablespoon per egg. Expect softer curds than eggs cooked dry, but this is not a lot of liquid.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is 3/4 teaspoon of pepper. That is assertively peppery by modern taste; start with half and adjust.
- Smoked beefThis is dried or chipped beef — the thin, dark, very salty air-dried beef sold in jars or packets, not smoked brisket. Two ounces is in the range of a small modern jar.
- Why blanch itThe three minutes in boiling water draws salt out of the beef, which is why the eggs are seasoned separately at all. Skip it and the dish will be very salty. Drain it well and blot it, or the water will thin the eggs further.
- Hold back on the saltThe half teaspoon of salt in the egg mixture assumes the beef has been leached. If you use unblanched beef, leave the salt out entirely.
- The timingSix minutes of stirring over anything but gentle heat will take the eggs well past soft. Work over medium-low heat, pull the pan while the curds still look slightly underdone, and fold the beef in at the end — it only needs warming through.
- Butter"One and a half tablespoons melted butter" can simply be melted in the pan; there is no need to melt it separately. A non-stick pan makes the whole thing easier.
- YieldEight eggs serves four as a main breakfast dish, six alongside toast and fruit. The "deep hot dish" matters more than it sounds — warmed china keeps soft eggs from cooling to rubber at the table.
Dried beef — thin-shaved, salt-cured, air-dried beef — was sold in sealed jars and packets as a shelf-stable pantry item that needed little more than hot water to become usable. Its best-known partner is the cream-sauce version served on toast; scrambling it into eggs is a simpler treatment. The precision of the instructions — saltspoons of pepper, a measured pint of blanching water, minutes counted off — is characteristic of professional cookery writing, set down for cooks working to measure and clock. Blanching was a common remedy for a preserved meat cured to survive rather than to taste mild.