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Eggs and Cheese
Well butter a fireproof dish, grate a little cheese over, dust with cayenne, and put it into the oven for seven or eight minutes to heat. Break carefully over this seven or eight eggs, grate some more cheese over, add a good sprinkling of pepper and salt, two ounces of bread-crumbs, and, lastly, some small pats of butter. Bake in a fairly hot oven for twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1s.
A baked egg-and-cheese dish of the simplest sort, from the chapter on principles rather than the recipe pages proper. The one thing to watch is the timing, which will give you set, faintly rubbery yolks if followed literally.
- The hinge: don't bake it for twenty minutesThe hinge: twenty minutes will likely overcook them. Eight eggs in a shallow buttered dish are usually set in something like 12 to 15 minutes in a hot oven, and residual heat carries on cooking them after they leave. Pull the dish when the whites are opaque but the yolks still wobble; the full twenty minutes risks chalky yolks and weeping cheese.
- "Fairly hot oven"Roughly 375-400F in modern terms, though the book gives no figure and the reading is an approximation. Hotter browns the crumbs before the whites have set; much cooler and the eggs go watery while they wait.
- Preheating the dishThe seven or eight minutes of heating the buttered, cheesed dish is not padding. It starts the whites setting from below on contact, which is what keeps the eggs from spreading into one flat sheet.
- Fireproof dishAny shallow earthenware or enamelled cast-iron gratin dish, about 9 or 10 inches. Glass works but conducts heat poorly, so the base will not sear the whites as intended.
- The cheeseA dry, hard cheese such as Cheddar or Cheshire would be a likely choice in a British kitchen of this period, though the recipe does not specify. Use something firm enough to grate on the coarse side of a box grater; soft or high-moisture cheese will release liquid into the eggs.
- BreadcrumbsTwo ounces is roughly a cup of fresh crumbs, or half that by volume if dried. Toss them with the butter pats rather than scattering both separately, so they brown evenly instead of scorching in patches.
- CayenneThe dusting in the hot dish is for aroma more than heat. A pinch is enough across the whole base.
- Yield and costEight eggs serve three or four as a supper dish with bread. "Probable cost, 1s." is a shilling, twelve old pence, the kind of figure Cassell's gave so a housekeeper could price a week's meals.
The recipe demonstrates a technique rather than a regional dish: eggs cooked by conducted and radiant heat in a buttered vessel, the dish French kitchens call oeufs sur le plat and English ones long called shirred or baked eggs. The addition of grated cheese and crumbs is characteristically late-Victorian British, part of a large family of cheap, savoury, oven-finished supper dishes that also produced macaroni cheese and Welsh rarebit. The costing in shillings is the giveaway as to audience: Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery was aimed at middle-class households of the servant-keeping sort, and most entries carry a probable cost so the cook could be held to a budget.