Our viands

When we consider the lavish use of eggs in former days, we are constrained to believe that our forefathers certainly paid more attention to the keeping and rearing of poultry than English farmers do at the present day, for eggs must have been more plentiful and cheaper than they are now, even with our abundant foreign supplies, or they could never have been used as balls, and employed by the dozen in cookery, as old receipts show us they were. We are now supplied with eggs from Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and France, and it is computed that from the last named country alone one million come daily to the London market. The number consumed in England yearly * Chambers's 'Book of Days,' vol. i., p. 429. EGGS "5 must be incalculable ; but new-laid English eggs are always difficult to procure, and during the winter are often sold at threepence apiece, whereas our grandmothers would prob- ably have considered a shilling a score very dear. It has been calculated that we pay six millions of pounds per annum for eggs ; and French cooks say they may be dressed in more than five hundred different ways. They are, however, used not only in cookery. In one photographic establishment, we are told, two millions are used every year ; and they are also employed largely in calico printing, leather dressing, and bookbinding ; and it is calculated that in France the number used in wine clarifying amounts to more than eighty millions a year. It may be well here to give a few of the uses of eggs in medicine, for they are valuable in many ways as household remedies. ' The white is the most efficacious of remedies for burns, and the oil extractable from the yolk is regarded by the Russians as an almost miraculous salve for cuts, bruises, and scratches. A raw egg, if swallowed in time, will effectually detach a fish-bone in the throat, and the white of two eggs will render the deadly corrosive sublimate as harmless as a dose of calomel. They strengthen the con- sumptive, invigorate the feeble, and render the most susceptible all but proof against jaundice in its more malignant phase.' The old saw had it — ' An egg, an apple, and a nut, You may eat after any slut. ' That, however, is not quite true as regards eggs, for the shell being porous readily absorbs anything malodorous which is placed near it, so that it is not uncommon to meet with eggs tasting of onions j and I remember once having ii6 OUR VIANDS had served to me three mornings running eggs highly flavoured with paraffin through a careless servant having thrown the cloth with which she cleaned the lamps over the egg basket.* It is also believed that eggs are affected by the food consumed by the hens ; and it is certain that portions of foreign bodies such as insects, seeds, small stones, etc., have been found in eggs, especially in ostrich eggs, the stones found in which have been polished and used as buttons or studs.