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Eggs and Asparagus
Cut tender asparagus into pieces half an inch long, and boil twenty minutes, then drain till dry, and put into a sauce-pan containing a cup of rich drawn butter; heat together to a boil, season with pepper and salt, and pour into a buttered dish. Break half a dozen eggs over the surface, put a bit of butter upon each, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and put in the oven until the eggs are set.
A straightforward shirred-egg dish that needs two adjustments: the asparagus is boiled roughly four times too long, and "drawn butter" is not simply melted butter.
- Drawn butterIn 19th-century American books this is a thin white sauce: about 1 tablespoon flour cooked in 2 tablespoons butter, thinned with a cup of hot water or milk, then enriched with more butter off the heat. "Rich" signals a generous proportion of butter. A cup of plain melted butter will break and pool.
- Boil twenty minutesHalf-inch pieces of tender asparagus are done in 3 to 5 minutes in salted water — cook to just tender and drain well. Twenty minutes turns them olive-grey and stringy.
- Drain till dryThis instruction is the hinge. Wet asparagus thins the sauce and makes the eggs weep in the oven. Spread the drained pieces on a towel for a few minutes before saucing.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the book assumes a range oven judged by hand. Bake at 350–375°F; six eggs over hot asparagus set in roughly 10 to 15 minutes, the whites firm and the yolks still soft.
- The dishUse a shallow buttered gratin or pie dish of about 9 inches, wide enough that six eggs sit in a single layer without crowding. Deep dishes steam the eggs rather than setting them.
- Egg doneness"Until the eggs are set" most likely means the whites are firm while the yolks are still soft. If you want fully firm yolks, allow another 4 or 5 minutes and expect the whites to toughen slightly.
- YieldThree servings as a light supper or lunch dish, four if it follows soup. The recipe gives no quantity of asparagus; roughly 1 lb trimmed suits the amount of sauce called for.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the mid-1870s as a compilation of contributed household receipts, and this page shows the period's two governing habits with vegetables: boil them hard, then dress them in drawn butter. Drawn butter was the default sauce of American cooking for most of the century — a flour-thickened butter sauce served over fish, asparagus, cauliflower and boiled fowl alike — and it survived in print long after French-trained cooks had begun calling for hollandaise instead. Asparagus itself was a genuinely seasonal luxury in the 1870s, available for a few weeks in spring from kitchen gardens and local growers, with no year-round imports to fall back on; stretching it with eggs into a full dish, rather than serving it alone as a side, made a small quantity feed a table. The technique of breaking eggs over a hot bed of sauced vegetable and setting them in the oven is what American books call shirred or baked eggs.