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Shirred Eggs with Tomato Sauce
Follow the directions for making plain Shirred Eggs, putting a heaping tablespoonful of tomato sauce in each dish before breaking in the egg. If desired, a little minced green pepper and onion, cooked until tender in enough Snowdrift to keep them from sticking, may be added to the tomato sauce.
A variation recipe that assumes you have the book's plain shirred eggs in front of you. Shirred eggs are baked in individual shallow dishes until the whites set and the yolks stay soft — the whole technique fits in a sentence or two, which is why the original does not repeat it.
- What shirring actually isButter or grease a shallow individual baking dish (a ramekin, a small gratin dish, or a cast-iron egg dish), break in the egg, season, and bake until the white is just opaque and the yolk still trembles; the book gives no temperature, but a moderate oven, around 350F for roughly 10 to 14 minutes, works. Pulling them at the moment the white sets is the whole difficulty; carryover heat in a hot dish keeps cooking the egg after it leaves the oven.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and the reason this book exists. Any ordinary cooking fat does the job here — butter or oil for the pepper and onion, butter for greasing the dishes.
- Tomato sauceNot Italian-style pasta sauce. A period tomato sauce is a thin, seasoned purée of cooked tomatoes, often lightly thickened with roux. A heaping tablespoon of passata reduced slightly, or a plain tomato coulis, is the right register; a heavily herbed jarred sauce will overwhelm the egg.
- Cook the vegetables through firstThe minced pepper and onion must be genuinely soft before they go under the egg. Twelve minutes in the oven will not tenderise raw onion, and crunchy bits under a soft yolk are the usual failure of this dish.
- Sauce goes under, not overThe recipe puts the sauce in the dish before the egg is broken in, so the yolk stays visible and sits above the sauce rather than under it.
- Watch for weepingTomato sauce releases liquid as it heats. If yours is thin, reduce it on the stove until it mounds on the spoon, or the egg will sit in a pink puddle.
- YieldOne dish per person for a light course, two for a breakfast. The recipe scales straight up — the only limit is oven space and how many dishes you can pull at the same moment.
Shirred eggs were a fixture of American hotel and household breakfast cookery from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s, the name often traced to the shallow shirring dish they were baked in, though the origin of "shirred" is obscure and just as often connected to "shirr" in the sewing sense — it is disputed whether the dish is named for the eggs or the eggs for the dish. In any case it is not a French term for the technique: French cooks call much the same thing oeufs sur le plat. The tomato-and-green-pepper version suits the book, whatever its regional associations: Snowdrift was made by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and its recipe pamphlets were promotional literature meant to persuade cooks that hydrogenated cottonseed shortening could replace butter and lard in every corner of the kitchen. That commercial purpose explains why the fat is named as a brand in the middle of a sentence about softening onions, where any ordinary cookbook would simply have written "butter."