CARL JUNCTION, Mo. — The dining-room table was set for a traditional afternoon tea.

Dawn Anderson-Kuhler served up toast and tea with sugar and cream for her guests, her cousin Debbie Hollis-Setser and her neighbor, Anna Hill, both of Carl Junction.

Also on the table was an item that’s not uncommon to find during tea time in England, but is not as well known on this side of the pond — coddled eggs.

An egg coddler is a porcelain cup with a stainless-steel lid, and it is submerged to the bottom of the lid in boiling water. It takes six to 10 minutes to coddle an egg in a single-egg coddler. However, you can also find two-egg coddlers, which take slightly longer to cook.

Anderson-Kuhler started collecting egg coddlers a year and a half ago after she was introduced to them by her mother-in-law, Patricia Kuhler of Fort Worth, Texas.

Since then, Anderson-Kuhler has accumulated a vast collection of egg coddlers.

Not only does she collect the coddlers, she now uses them to cook eggs for her husband, David, and herself.

“It will make an egg lover like eggs more,” she said. “When I found out about them, I bought one coddler from Southside Antiques and came home on a Friday and told my husband what I bought. He said, ‘Oh great, just one more thing to collect dust.’ On Saturday morning, I fixed a coddled egg for myself and said, ‘Oh my gosh, these are so much better than any egg I’ve ever had.’ I said, ‘David, let me make you a coddled egg,’ and I told him that if he didn't like it I would finish it. He ate the whole thing and two more after that.”

When the eggs are cooked, they can be eaten straight from the coddler with a spoon.

“Americans may think this is similar to poaching, but it isn’t,” says Anderson- Kuhler. “First of all, when you coddle, the vitamins are kept in the egg. With poaching, the vitamins and flavor are boiled out of the egg.”

She uses real butter, sea salt and cracked pepper to prepare her coddled eggs.

Several ingredients can be added prior to cooking. Flaked fish, cheese, herbs, chopped ham, mushrooms can be added to the egg before the egg is cooked.

Anderson-Kuhler says she makes sure that the stainless-steel tops are not dented or rusted when purchasing the coddlers.



How to coddle an egg

Lightly butter the inside of the coddler cup. Break egg into it. Add butter, salt and pepper for flavor. Screw on lid. Cook six minutes in enough boiling water to cover coddler. Lift cup from water by metal ring. When you unscrew the top, grasp the whole cover. If the egg is not cooked enough, replace the lid and return the coddler to the boiling water. For variety, add flaked fish, cheese, herbs, chopped ham, mushrooms, etc. to the egg. Coddlers are also ideal for heating baby foods.

Source: Recipe by Royal Worcester, an English company that manufactures egg coddlers.



Egg hunt

While they may be hard to find in stores, Dawn Anderson-Kuhler said that egg coddlers can be found in antique stores and on eBay.



Rachel Kubicek writes for The Joplin (Mo.) Globe.