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Egg Puff
Separate the white and yolk of a fresh egg. Beat the white stiff; form it into a nest and place in a thin, wide topped cup. Make a shallow hollow in the center of the nest and put into it the unbroken yolk. Set the cup in a pan of boiling water; cover and cook for three minutes. Remove carefully from the cup to a hot plate and season with butter, pepper and salt. This makes not only an attractive and palatable dish for an involid but is more digestible than when cooked in the shell or when the white is unbeaten. Eggs cooked in this manner and sprinkled with chopped parsley make an attractive breakfast dish.
A single egg, deconstructed and steamed in a cup — essentially a one-portion meringue nest with a soft yolk at its center. The whole thing lives or dies on how stiffly the white is beaten and how briefly it cooks.
- The hinge: beat the white properlyThe white must hold a stiff peak so the nest keeps its shape and the yolk sits in the hollow rather than sliding through. A copper or scrupulously clean glass or steel bowl and no trace of yolk in the white; a few drops of lemon juice helps stabilize it.
- "A thin, wide topped cup"The book gives no reason for the thin, wide-topped cup; thin walls would pass heat quickly and a wide top makes it easier to lift the nest out whole. Use a heatproof ramekin or a small glass custard cup, about 6 oz, and butter it or the meringue will cling when you turn it out.
- The pan of boiling waterThis is a covered steam bath, not a bain-marie in the oven. Set the cup in a saucepan with an inch of simmering water, put the lid on the pan, and keep the water at a bare simmer so the white does not puff and collapse.
- Three minutesThree minutes sets the white and leaves the yolk liquid. Expect five to seven minutes for a firm yolk in a modern ramekin, which is thicker than the china the book assumes. Beyond that the meringue toughens and weeps.
- Keep the yolk wholeSeparate over a bowl and slide the yolk gently into the hollow. A broken yolk bleeds through the white and the dish loses the point of the contrast.
- For anyone vulnerableThe book recommends this for invalids, but a yolk cooked three minutes is not brought to a safe temperature. For someone ill, pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised, use pasteurized shell eggs or cook the yolk through.
- Yield and servingOne egg is one serving; multiply cups as needed and cook them in the same pan. Season after unmolding, as the book says — salt beaten into the white slackens it, and butter added before cooking pools in the hollow.
This belongs to invalid cookery, a standing department of late nineteenth-century American household manuals, where the sickroom tray was treated as a distinct branch of the kitchen with its own gruels, beef teas, and coddled eggs. The claim that a beaten, steamed egg is "more digestible" than one cooked in the shell reflects a period conviction, common in domestic-science writing of the 1890s and 1900s, that lightness and aeration made food easier on a weak stomach — a belief about texture rather than a documented physiological fact. What survives is the technique: separating an egg and steaming the white into a nest around the yolk. The parsley garnish at the end suggests a dish from the sickroom repertoire was thought presentable enough for the family table.