The spirit of cookery

The principles according to which eggs are to be boiled are readily enunciated, but difficult to carry out. There are many likings as regards the degree to which eggs should be boiled. For purposes of definition, we acknowledge the following : An egg placed in boiling water for a short time — say not exceeding two minutes — and removed and then opened, will be found to have formed a thin coating of curdled white of egg near the shell ; the rest of the white is turbid or milky, but not set; the yolk is entirely fluid, but warm. This is the minimum of cooking an egg should receive, and it may then be called very soft-boiled. When an egg is kept during two minutes or a little longer in boiling water, and then opened, it will be found that the white is almost completely set, while the yolk retains a degree of fluidity. This some call waxy consistency, a term for which there is no practical explanation. This form also has its friends. The third form we may call solid-boiled. It requires more than three minutes’ boiling, and the completion of the process is indicated by the egg rising to the surface of the water, or, at all events, exhibiting a lesser specific gravity than at the beginning of the boiling. If the egg be now opened, it will be found solid throughout, but of equable granular consistency, and agreeable to eat. But if the egg be retained in the boiling water for any considerable time beyond this point — say up to ten minutes — •a stage which we will describe as hard-boiled, the white will become hard, elastic, shiny, the yolk rough, and the whole egg will become not only less good in taste, but also much less digestible ; or, to put it more definitely, its digestion will require more time than it would if it had been eaten when just boiled solid. There are culinary authors who prescribe that eggs to be parboiled, or boiled soft, should be put up in cold water, and gradually heated. This is probably the most difficult proceeding by which to arrive at a definite result ; but everyone can adapt this process to his liking if he observe the following principles which govern the process. There is even a machine, called an egg-cooker, which ensures the cooking of eggs to the desired point. Eggs must be assumed to be at the average temperature of the air. Now, if such an egg be placed in boiling water, the effect produced upon it will depend upon the quantity of the water and the swiftness of the production of heat underneath the vessel in which it is boiling. As these conditions will be constantly varying, and, more particularly, the eggs will be varying in number, no mathematical rules for boiling eggs can be laid down such as could be observed practically in a rO.-lCfriXG AXD frying of eggs kitchen, however accurately an egg, or any number of eggs, may be boiled by a strict application of these mathematical rules in a laboratory or on a breakfast-table. Hence it follows that the boiling of eggs in kitchens will mostly be left to the instinctive feeling of cooks, and that the practice which they have once acquired can never be modified, because it is inaccessible to argument based upon physical data, and therefore boiled eggs for breakfast will always, within certain limits, be a result of fortuity.