I had two lovely grandmothers and was lucky enough to have them in my life until I was in my 40s.  Both of them were really great cooks and although they were both from more or less the same part of the world, i.e. Kent, had very different repertoires and tastes.  When I started to enjoy cooking, I made it a mission to take notes of their recipes and was handed down hand written notes of all sorts of delicious but not necessarily healthy, culinary lovelinesses!

It’s January so I’ve been trying to start off the New Year on the right note by having a bit of a sort out of my files of recipes and notes and bits of paper I move from one drawer to another every time I have a tidying fit.  That led me to Nanny Peach’s cake recipes, all beautifully and neatly handwritten on thick lined paper only to discover that there was a note on the back of one recipe about dippy eggs and soldiers that I’d previously missed.

I’ve always loved dippy eggs – or soft boiled eggs if you want to be all grown up about it.  But it’s so disappointing when you crack one open to find that the white is still slimy or the yellow has cooked through and is no longer dippable.

I’ve tried out my grandmother’s method four times this afternoon just to make sure and it works beautifully!  Lovely firm whites and gooey hot runny dippable yolks – wonderful.  If you want those lovely cheffy style hard boiled eggs with a runny centre you get with a posh salad in restaurants, you could use this method and plunge the eggs into iced water to arrest the cooking when you remove them from the pot – I just tried that too – lovely with my chicken caesar.

And it is SO simple – you just use a steamer pan.  Put the eggs into the steamer section of the pan over boiling water, cover and steam for six minutes.  Remove and pop them into an egg cup, slice off the top and in you go with your soldiers…….yum, ultimate comfort breakfast!  And because the eggs don’t rattle around and bash against each other in the pan, they don’t split and leak either.