Shirred Eggs
Lightly rub ramekins or shirred egg dishes with Snowdrift. Break an egg in each, dust it with salt and pepper, and sprinkle with coarse bread crumbs, which have been mixed with melted Snowdrift. Stand in a pan of hot water in the oven and bake until the eggs are set and the crumbs are lightly browned.
A short, workable recipe whose only real obstacle is the brand name in every line. Snowdrift was a vegetable shortening; butter is the obvious substitute and improves the dish.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, promoted as a butter and lard substitute. Use softened butter for greasing and melted butter for the crumbs, or a neutral oil if you want the flatter flavour the original had.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. A moderate oven, 325-350F, suits eggs in a water bath; hotter than that and the whites toughen at the edges before the yolks set.
- TimingExpect 12-18 minutes for a set white and a soft yolk, depending on dish depth. The eggs continue cooking after they leave the oven, so pull them while the yolk still trembles.
- The water bathThis is the hinge of the recipe. The hot water buffers the direct heat so the egg sets gently rather than curdling; fill the pan to roughly halfway up the ramekins with water that is already hot.
- Coarse bread crumbsMeans crumbs torn or grated from stale bread, not the fine dried sand sold in canisters. Fine crumbs turn to paste on the egg white; coarse ones brown and stay crisp.
- Browning the crumbsA gentle oven may set the eggs before the topping colours. Thirty seconds under the broiler at the end fixes this, watched closely.
- YieldOne egg per ramekin, two ramekins per person at breakfast or supper. Multiply as needed; they cook at the same rate as long as the ramekins are the same size.
This is advertising copy in recipe form. Snowdrift was one of the big cottonseed-oil shortenings of the early twentieth century, and books like this one were published to prove the product could stand in for butter and lard anywhere in the kitchen "" hence its appearance in a dish where the fat does almost nothing but grease a dish and moisten crumbs. Shirred eggs themselves are older and French in ancestry, though the origin of the word "shirred" is genuinely obscure; the dish is a near relation of the oeuf sur le plat, baked rather than fried. The technique survives largely unchanged as oeufs en cocotte.