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EGGS (au Gratin)
Chop very fine an anchovy, a shallot, and a sprig of parsley, and mix them with three yolks of eggs to a small cupful of bread-crumbs and two ounces of butter; season with salt and pepper. Have ready a hot dish; butter it well, and strew the mixture over the bottom. Place the dish in a Dutch oven, and brown it slightly; then break half a dozen eggs into separate cups and slide them neatly on to the dish, after which return it to the oven for three minutes, or until the whites have set. Serve immediately. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for three persons.
A Victorian baked-egg dish in which the gratin element is a savoury crumb bed rather than a cheese topping. Most of the adaptation is in the equipment and the timing.
- The Dutch ovenHere this means a reflector oven — an open-fronted metal box stood before the fire — not the lidded cast-iron pot. Use a conventional oven at 400F, or the crumb base can be browned under a broiler and the dish then moved to the oven for the eggs.
- Three minutes is optimisticReflector ovens throw fierce direct radiant heat. In a domestic oven at 400F, six eggs in a buttered dish need roughly 8 to 12 minutes for the whites to set with the yolks still soft. Judge by the whites losing all translucency, and pull the dish while the yolks still wobble, as they will carry on cooking.
- SaltAn anchovy, plus salted butter if that is what you use, gives a good deal of salt already. Season the crumb mixture lightly and taste it before it goes into the dish.
- The raw shallotChopped shallot in a base that cooks for only a few minutes stays sharp. Sweating it in a little of the butter first gives a smoother result, though the original does not call for it.
- A small cupful of bread-crumbsRead this as fresh soft crumbs, on the order of 2 oz, not dried packaged crumbs, which will drink the butter and set hard.
- Egg yolks in the baseThree yolks bind the crumbs into a paste. Work the butter in soft, not melted, or the mixture will be greasy rather than spreadable.
- Why the cupsBreaking each egg into a cup first is not fussiness — it lets you slide the eggs on without breaking yolks and without a shell fragment landing in a dish you cannot then stir.
- Cost and yield1s. 3d. was the estimated cost when the book was compiled and has no modern meaning. Sufficient for three as a light supper or breakfast dish; two eggs a head.
Au gratin in nineteenth-century English cookery books meant simply browned on top, usually by way of crumbs and butter, and did not yet imply the cheese sauce the phrase now suggests to most cooks. The anchovy is the telling detail: British kitchens of the period reached constantly for anchovy, essence or fillet, as a savoury seasoning where a French cook might have used stock reductions, and it turns up in everything from steak sauces to breakfast toasts. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was an enormous alphabetical compendium aimed at middle-class households, and each entry carries a probable cost and a number served. Baked eggs on a seasoned bed seem to have suited the breakfast or supper table, cheap, quick before the fire, and dressed up enough to serve to company.