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Coddled Eggs
Allow cup milk for each slightly beaten egg. Cook mixture in a double boiler, stirring constantly until thickened. Season with salt and pepper and serve on buttered toast.
A very short set of instructions from the invalid-cookery chapter — essentially a milk-and-egg custard scrambled soft and spooned over toast. Two things need clarifying before you start: a missing measurement and a name that does not mean what it usually means.
- The missing fractionThe original reads "Allow cup milk for each slightly beaten egg" — the fraction has dropped out of the printed line. A whole cup of milk per egg will not thicken into anything spoonable; the intended figure was almost certainly a quarter or a third of a cup. Start with about 1/4 cup per egg.
- "Coddled" here is not the shell methodModern usage means an egg cooked gently in its shell, often in a lidded coddler. Here the word is used more loosely, for an egg cooked gently below boiling; this version is a stirred custard.
- The hinge: keep the water below a simmerThe double boiler is there to moderate the heat so the egg sets slowly instead of seizing; it does not by itself guarantee a safe ceiling. Water at a hard boil can still carry the mixture high enough to curdle it into grainy curds and weeping liquid, no matter how much you stir.
- DonenessPull it off the heat while it still looks slightly loose and coats the spoon thinly; residual heat in the pan carries it further. It should thicken in 6 to 10 minutes for a two-egg batch.
- Safe temperatureCook until it visibly thickens and holds a trail from the spoon. A stirred egg-and-milk mixture generally thickens somewhere in the region of 170F, above the 160F usually given for eggs, so a separate check is not normally needed.
- YieldTwo eggs with about half a cup of milk serves one, on two slices of toast. The recipe calls for salt and pepper; season lightly.
- ServingToast the bread dry and butter it just before the eggs go on, or the moisture in the custard will collapse it.
Invalid cookery was a common chapter in American household manuals from the later nineteenth century into the twentieth, and it operated on a consistent theory: a sick person needed nourishment in the most digestible form available, which in practice meant milk, eggs, beef tea, gruels and broths cooked as gently as possible. Eggs were prized as concentrated, easily assimilated food, and the double boiler recurs throughout such chapters because it slows the setting of egg mixtures — though this recipe still calls for constant stirring. The instruction to serve on buttered toast suggests convalescent rather than acute-illness food, of the same family as milk toast and cream toast. Recipes of this kind became less common in cookbooks as dietary advice passed to physicians and dietitians.