Poach eggs as soft as possible. Butter a baking-dish; add a layer of bread-crumbs and grated cheese. Place the eggs on the crumbs; sprinkle with salt, pepper, grated cheese and chopped parsley. Cover with bread-crumbs and pour over some cream sauce. Let bake in a hot oven until brown on top. Serve with toast.
A short, loosely written recipe of the kind that assumes the cook already knows how to poach an egg and make a cream sauce. The whole thing hinges on undercooking the eggs at the poaching stage.
- Poach very soft, then chillThe eggs go into a hot oven a second time, so poach them barely 2 minutes — whites just set, yolks fully liquid. Lifting them into cold water for a moment stops the carryover cooking and makes them easier to handle without tearing.
- "A hot oven"425–450F. The dish is in only long enough to brown the crumb topping and heat the sauce through, roughly 5–8 minutes. Longer and the yolks set hard, which defeats the point.
- Cream sauceA thin béchamel: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1½ cups milk or half milk and half cream, seasoned with salt and a scrape of nutmeg. It should pour, not mound.
- Bread-crumbsDry crumbs from stale bread, not the soft fresh kind and not the sandy commercial variety. Toss the top layer with a little melted butter so it browns rather than drying out.
- The cheeseThe book does not specify. A firm grating cheese is meant — Parmesan or a dry aged Cheddar. A young Manchego would suit the name of the dish.
- Quantities and yieldNone are given. For four servings, figure 8 eggs, about a cup of crumbs, ¾ cup grated cheese and the sauce above, in a shallow dish wide enough to hold the eggs in one layer.
- Assemble in one dish or severalIndividual gratin dishes or shallow ramekins brown faster and travel to the table intact; a single large dish is harder to serve without breaking yolks.
- ServingToast on the side, cut into points, is doing the same job as the crumb layer beneath. Serve the moment it comes out of the oven.
"Spanish" in a book of this type is a loose label rather than a claim of provenance — the compiler is offering a dish a day drawn from a notional map of Europe and beyond, and the tag tends to mean tomatoes, peppers, onion, or paprika. What is actually described here is a French gratin technique: poached eggs bedded on crumbs, masked with béchamel, and browned. The genre was useful to households because it turned eggs into a hot dish substantial enough for supper or a lunch course. Eggs cooked "sur le plat" or gratinéed under sauce appear across the standard household manuals of the period under a variety of national adjectives, and the adjectives are best read as menu-writing rather than geography.