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Eggs and Bread Sauce
Make about half a pint of good bread sauce nicely flavoured with onion (see BREAD SAUCE), turn it into a fireproof baking-dish, slip six eggs carefully on top, and bake in a hot oven for about five minutes, or until the eggs are set. Probable cost, 9d.
A supper dish of eggs baked on a bed of bread sauce, and one that lives or dies by how loose the sauce is when it goes into the dish. Six eggs on half a pint of sauce is a crowded pan; a wide shallow dish gives each yolk room.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Spread over a dish of roughly 9 by 7 inches that is only a quarter-inch layer; a smaller dish gives the eggs a deeper bed.
- Bread sauce, in shortMilk infused with a peeled onion stuck with a few cloves, strained, then thickened with fresh white breadcrumbs and finished with butter, salt and pepper. Cassell sends you to the separate entry; any standard version will do.
- Keep the sauce slackBread sauce stiffens as it stands and stiffens again in the oven. Make it looser than you would for serving with game, or the eggs will sit on a dry paste.
- A hot ovenTake that as 425-450F. The dish should already be warm from the sauce, which is why the stated time is so short.
- Five minutes is optimisticWhites set at around 145F, yolks at 158F. Even on hot sauce in a hot oven, expect 8-12 minutes for set whites and soft yolks. Judge by the whites turning opaque rather than by the clock, and pull the dish while the yolks still wobble, since carryover heat continues to cook them.
- Slipping the eggsBreak each egg into a cup first and slide it onto the sauce. Making a shallow hollow for each with the back of a spoon keeps them from drifting into one another.
- Yield and costSix eggs serves three as a light supper or six as a savoury course. The ninepence is a late-Victorian retail estimate and no guide to anything now.
Bread sauce is one of the oldest survivals in the English kitchen, a descendant of the medieval habit of thickening sauces with bread rather than flour or butter, and by the nineteenth century it had narrowed almost entirely to a single job: the accompaniment to roast game birds and turkey. Recipes like this one belong to the thrifty second life of such sauces. The pattern, eggs broken onto a bed of something already made and set in a hot oven, runs right through the period under names like eggs au gratin and oeufs sur le plat; the bed changed with whatever the house had, whether spinach, tomato, minced ham or, here, the sauceboat's remains.