Escaloped Eggs
Moisten bread-crumbs with milk or meat broth; place a layer of this in a well-buttered dish; slice some hard-boiled eggs, and dip each slice in a thick-drawn butter sauce to which a well-beaten egg has been added; put a layer of them upon the crumbs, then a slight layer of minced ham, veal or chicken, then bread, etc., finishing with dry, sifted bread-crumbs; bake until well heated; or, mix equal parts minced ham and fine bread-crumbs, season with salt, pepper and melted butter, adding milk to moisten till quite soft; half fill buttered gem-pans or small patty-pans with this mixture, and break an egg carefully upon the top of each, dust with salt and pepper, sprinkle finely powdered crackers over all, set in the oven and bake eight minutes; serve immediately.
Two dishes in one entry: a layered casserole of hard-boiled egg slices and minced meat, and individual baked eggs set on a ham-and-crumb bed. Both assume you have cooked meat and a butter sauce already on hand.
- Drawn butter sauceNineteenth-century "drawn butter" is a flour-and-butter sauce thinned with water or milk, closer to a thick b"chamel Make a roux of 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour, whisk in about a cup of milk or broth, then beat in the raw egg off the heat so it does not scramble.
- Oven heatNeither version gives a temperature. For the layered dish, 350F for 25-30 minutes until the top is browned and the centre steams; for the gem-pan eggs, 400F suits the eight minutes given.
- Gem-pans and patty-pansGem-pans are cast-iron muffin tins; patty-pans are small individual tart tins. A standard 12-cup muffin tin does the job, buttered heavily since the ham mixture sticks.
- Eight minutes is for soft yolksEight minutes is a short bake -- at around 400F it should leave the whites set and the yolks still soft, though this will vary with the pan and oven. Add a few minutes for firm yolks, bearing in mind the ham base dries out the longer it stays in.
- Moistening the crumbsUse dry breadcrumbs or stale bread, not fresh soft crumbs, which turn to paste. Moisten only until the crumbs hold together and no liquid pools in the dish.
- Seasoning the first versionThe layered dish is unseasoned as written apart from what the ham brings. Salt the crumb layers and the sauce, and pepper generously; boiled egg and bread are both bland.
- YieldNo quantities are given for either version. The layered dish scales to whatever dish you use; the second makes one egg per pan cup.
Escaloped, scalloped or escalloped meant baked in layers with crumbs; the word is traditionally traced to the scallop shells once used as baking dishes, though that derivation is customary rather than documented. By the 1870s it covered oysters, potatoes, tomatoes and, here, eggs. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping was issued by the Buckeye Publishing Company in 1877 and grew out of an earlier Ohio compilation of contributed recipes. It is full of such dishes because they solved a daily problem: what to do with the small quantity of cold roast ham, veal or chicken left from yesterday. Hard-boiled eggs, crumbs and a butter sauce stretched a few ounces of meat into a supper dish, and the second version is a form of the individual baked or shirred egg current in the same period.