Baked Eggs
Break eight eggs into a well-buttered dish, put in pepper and salt, bits of butter, and three table-spoons cream; set in oven and bake about twenty minutes; serve very hot.
A plain shirred-egg formula from a book that assumes you know your own stove. The two things it leaves out are the oven temperature and the fact that twenty minutes will set the yolks hard.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none, which on a wood range meant "whatever you have." A moderate oven, around 350F, suits this; higher and the whites toughen at the edge before the centre sets.
- TimingTwenty minutes at 350F gives firm, fully cooked yolks. For soft yolks with just-set whites, expect 12 to 15 minutes and pull the dish when the whites are barely opaque, as carryover heat continues the cooking.
- The dishUse a shallow gratin or pie dish rather than anything deep. Eight eggs crowded into a small bowl steam rather than bake, and the bottom layer overcooks while the top stays raw.
- Butter the dish properly"Well-buttered" is the hinge here. Baked egg white grips ceramic hard, and a thin film is not enough; go heavy, and pay attention to the corners where the dish meets the side.
- CreamThree tablespoons of cream over eight eggs is a light gloss, not a custard. Cream skimmed by hand varied a good deal in richness and was generally thinner than modern heavy cream at 36 percent; single/light cream gets you closer to the original.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Eight eggs would serve about four as a breakfast dish, or six alongside toast and bacon.
- Serving"Serve very hot" means bring the baking dish to the table. Eggs held on a plate stiffen and weep within a few minutes.
Baked or shirred eggs belong to a family of dishes that made sense in a kitchen with a permanently hot range: the oven was already going for bread or a roast, so eggs could be set down in a buttered dish and left. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Ohio in the 1870s and reprinted heavily through the following decades, gives a good deal of space to eggs. The French term for the technique, oeufs sur le plat, describes the same thing, and the English word "shirred" is generally traced to the shirred or gathered look of the set whites, though the etymology is not firmly settled. Note the absence of any oven temperature: reliable thermometers in home ovens were not common until the early twentieth century, and a cook was expected to judge heat by hand and habit.