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Egg Salad
1. Cut the whites of hard-boiled eggs into eighths lengthwise, arrange on lettuce to simulate the petals of a flower. Put yolks through ricer and arrange in the center of whites. Serve with boiled dressing. 2. Cut eggs lengthwise in quarters and serve on lettuce with boiled dressing. 3. Chop whites finely and arrange on lettuce. Put yolk through ricer and mound in the center. Serve with boiled dressing. and mound in the center. Serve with boiled dressing. 4. Diced hard-boiled eggs and sliced cucumbers may be added to potatoes. Eggs and fish combine very well with watercress or escarole.
Four arrangements of the same two ingredients — hard-boiled egg and lettuce — with the dressing doing the work. The only real technique here is the egg itself and the dressing the book assumes you already know.
- Boiled dressing is the missing recipeThe book expects you to turn to its own boiled dressing. Such dressings are typically a cooked, custard-like mixture of egg yolk, flour or cornstarch, vinegar, sugar, mustard and milk, thickened over water and cooled. It is tangier and thinner than mayonnaise, and it was widely used in period cookbooks. Mayonnaise thinned with a little vinegar is the nearest substitute, though it is richer.
- Cook the eggs so the yolks stay yellowBring the eggs to a boil, cover, take off the heat and let stand about 10-12 minutes, then chill hard in cold water. The grey-green ring around an overcooked yolk will show badly in arrangements 1 and 3, where the yolk is the visible centrepiece.
- The ricerA potato ricer forces the cooked yolk into fine strands, giving the mimosa effect. A fine-mesh sieve pressed with the back of a spoon does the same thing, and a box grater on the fine side is close enough.
- PeelingEggs a week or more old peel far more cleanly than fresh ones. For arrangement 1, where the white is cut into eight lengthwise petals, a torn white ruins the effect entirely.
- EscaroleStill sold, though often as part of a chicory or frisée mix. It is bitter and sturdy, and stands up to egg and oily fish in a way that lettuce does not.
- Item 4 is a note, not a dishThe fourth paragraph reads as an addition to potatoes, presumably a potato salad, rather than a dish in its own right. The phrase "and mound in the center. Serve with boiled dressing." appears twice in item 3 and has been left as printed.
- YieldFigure one to two eggs per person as a side salad, two as a light lunch. Cut and dress at the last moment — cut whites weep and lettuce wilts quickly under a dressing.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and distributed free to policyholders, part of a broad early-twentieth-century campaign in which insurers gave out health, hygiene and nutrition literature on the reasoning that longer-lived customers were better business. That accounts for the tone of this page: no flourishes, no butter, no expense, just four ways to make two hard-boiled eggs look like a course. The flower arrangement in the first version resembles the salad known as eggs mimosa, said to be named for the yellow powdery blossom the riced yolk recalls. Boiled dressing, called for in the first three arrangements here, remained in wide use in American home cooking after commercial mayonnaise arrived in jars — it used pantry staples and needed no steady hand with oil.