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Eggs, Scalloped
Make a forcemeat with grated ham or tongue, fine bread-crumbs, pepper, salt, a little minced parsley, and some melted butter; moisten with milk to a smooth paste. Half fill some scallop-shells with the mixture, break an egg carefully on top of each, season with salt and pepper, and sprinkle a few bread-crumbs over. Bake in the oven for six or seven minutes until the eggs are set. Probable cost, 1s.
A Victorian savoury built on leftovers: a seasoned ham paste in the bottom of a shell, an egg baked on top. It works well, but the original leaves out the oven temperature and is optimistic about the timing.
- Oven heatThe original gives no temperature. For something this shallow, set yours to 400F: lower than that and the whites take much longer than the stated six or seven minutes, by which point the yolks have set hard.
- The timingSix or seven minutes at 400F will set the whites only if the shells and forcemeat are already warm. From cold, expect 10-12 minutes. Pull them when the whites are opaque and the yolks still tremble; carryover heat in a hot shell keeps cooking them on the way to the table.
- Scallop-shellsReal shells were standard kitchen equipment and are still sold for baking; scrub and oil them. Shallow ramekins, gratin dishes or a large muffin tin do the same job. Anything deep changes the cooking entirely — you want the egg spread wide and shallow.
- Forcemeat, not stuffing"Forcemeat" here just means a bound savoury paste. Aim for the texture of thick hummus: it should sit level in the shell without slumping, so add milk a spoonful at a time. Too wet and the egg slides off; too dry and it bakes into a crust.
- Tongue and hamPressed ox tongue is a delicatessen item now rather than a household staple. Cooked ham, prosciutto ends or leftover gammon all work; grate or chop very fine so the paste stays smooth.
- SaltBoth ham and tongue are cured, and the recipe salts twice over — the paste and then the egg. Season the forcemeat, then salt the egg lightly or not at all and taste before adding more.
- Yield and servingOne shell per person as a first course or supper dish, two for a light main. Serve immediately in the shells set on plates, with toast; they collapse and weep if held.
- "Probable cost, 1s."A shilling for the dish as a whole, not per shell — Cassell's costed recipes for household budgeting, and this was a cheap way to use scraps of cooked meat.
Scalloped eggs belong to the long English tradition of the savoury, the small hot dish that closed a Victorian dinner after the sweet or appeared at breakfast and supper. The name comes from the vessel rather than the shellfish: by the eighteenth century "to scallop" meant to bake something in scallop-shells, and cooks kept a stock of them for oysters, minced meat and, as here, eggs. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an omnibus of several thousand entries aimed at middle-class households with a servant or two, is full of recipes of exactly this shape — a use for the cold ham or the end of the pressed tongue, costed to the shilling, and quick enough to be sent up hot. The technique survives in the French oeufs en cocotte and in every version of baked eggs on a bed of something savoury.