Early Chinese Egg Recipies

Someone asked me if they knew of period (pre-1600) recipes for century eggs.  Wikipedia is pretty down on the idea, but I did find a few interesting egg recipes, including a century egg recipe which is probably period.

Ni Zan doesn't mention eggs as far as I can tell with searches.

In Qimin Yaoshu (544 CE), eggs are called "chicken babies" (雞子) rather than the modern word for egg.

There are a few interesting recipes here:

To Make Poached Eggs (#4)

Break them, add them to boiling broth [or hot water], and when the float up, sieze them.  They are most properly eaten when freshly boiled, and with salt and vinegar added.

To Stir-Fry Eggs (#5)

Break them, and put them in a wok.  Stir them so that the yolks and whites are mixed.  Finely separate [擘] scallion-whites [onions would be fine], add some salt and grain, mix in fermented beans, and hempseed [possibly sesame] oil and stir-fry it.  A fragrant and delicious dish.

Please note that I haven't cross-checked these with my annotated edition, so there may be a few errors.

Eggs are used in some fermented sauces and meat preserves as well, but those are a whole other topic.

I did eventually find a reference to what might be century eggs in the annotations to Miscellaneous Chapters from the House on Bamboo Isle Mountain, scroll 3, which is apparently a Ming dynasty text, and so would be either period or just post-period:

Eggs, not from wild birds (#276)

To preserve ["in salt, sugar, etc.; pickle"], first use water to get them clean, and then dry them and put them in a weng [urn] with porridge and salt; for every thousand, perhaps four dou of rice stalk ash and 15 jin of salt or perhaps thirteen jin.  Pound the mixture in a sack until moist, and put in in a weng.  Possibly store it in a bamboo basket so that the wind may penetrate it.

This sounds like a recipe for lactic pickling of eggs.  The starch in the porridge will ferment to lactic acid.  Although with the ash maybe this is already a century egg recipe?  The text is a little ambiguous.

The annotation then begins,

Sui Shi reads, "Mixing [some kind of tree] seeds and the bark juice with the salt and soaking it."  If you wish to make "primordial eggs," take one dou of ashes from burnt charcoal, one sheng of lime, and mix it in salt water.  Put it in a cauldron, and simmer at the first boil until [perhaps, let cool until?] warm.  Wrap eggs in hemp cloth [and soak them in this?] for five to seven days, and the insides will be mixed to one place [untranslatable].

There's your century eggs.  Note that neither recipe says to cook the eggs first, which matches modern recipes.

Wang Li's Dictionary of Old Chinese (王力古漢語字典) estimates that in the Ming dynasty, one dou was about 1 liter, one sheng was 100 milliliters, and one jin was about 590 grams.  Jin are often "translated" as "catties" for some reason I don't understand - if you're comparing with other translations you should be aware of this.

I wasn't able to find more precise information on the date of this text.  It's Ming, which means it was written between 1368 and 1644.  The copy that's been digitized was transcribed in the eleventh month of 1781, as part of the Qianlong Emperor's Siku Quanshu project which created 8 libraries containing basically every book in existence, and a few of these libraries survive to today, where there have been scanned and OCR'd.

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