Melt 1 ounce of butter in a baking-pan; then cover the bottom of the pan with thin slices of Swiss cheese. Break in 6 eggs; sprinkle with salt and pepper. Pour over 4 tablespoonfuls of cream; sprinkle with grated Swiss cheese, and let bake in the oven to a delicate brown. Serve hot.
A six-egg gratin with almost nothing to it, so the whole dish rests on catching the eggs before the yolks set. The original gives no oven temperature and no pan size, which are the two things worth fixing before you start.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. Baked eggs of this type want a moderate oven, 350F, on an upper rack so the cheese browns while the whites finish. Hotter than about 400F and the whites toughen and weep before the top colours.
- Pan sizeUse a dish that holds the six eggs in a single layer without crowding — a 9-inch pie plate or a 10-inch skillet is about right. Deeper and narrower, and the eggs will steam rather than brown.
- The hinge: pull it early"A delicate brown" arrives at roughly 12 to 16 minutes, but judge by the whites: they should be just opaque and barely trembling, with the yolks still fluid. Residual heat keeps cooking them on the way to the table, so take the dish out while it still looks slightly underdone.
- Swiss cheeseIn 1908 this means Emmental or a similar Alpine wheel, not the pale processed sandwich slices sold under the name now. Emmental or Gruyère both work; Gruyère browns more readily and tastes less sweet.
- CreamThe recipe does not say thin or thick, a distinction period books did make. Heavy cream gives the richest result; thinner dairy is more likely to loosen around the eggs than to enrich them.
- SaltingBe sparing overall: Gruyere in particular is salty, and the grated topping adds more. Season before the cream goes on so it does not sit in visible grains on top.
- YieldSix eggs serves three as a light lunch or supper dish, or six if it is one course among several.
Baked or shirred eggs on a bed of cheese belong to the Alpine habit of using hard mountain cheese as a cooking medium rather than a table cheese -- the same instinct behind fondue, where Gruyere and Emmental are melted rather than sliced. Books of this era often used "Swiss" on a menu as shorthand for that cheese. The format of this book, a dish a day with a country attached, belongs to a period when cookbooks were selling the idea of foreign cooking as variety for the household menu. The nationality is often the thinnest part of the recipe: this one is a plain gratin of eggs, and what makes it Swiss is the cheese in the pan.