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Baked Eggs and Bacon
Allow 2 very thin slices of bacon to each egg. Fry the bacon very crisp and place the slices by twos on a large, flat, buttered plate. Carefully break an egg over each pair; bake in a hot oven until the eggs are set. Before placing in the oven dust the eggs with a little pepper and salt, and on taking them out put a small bit of butter on the top of each. Serve at once on the plate in which they were baked.
A quick breakfast dish that depends entirely on pulling the eggs out before the yolks firm. Two or three minutes separate soft from chalky.
- Oven temperature"a hot oven" in books of this period is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat the whites should set in well under ten minutes, so start checking early.
- The hingeTake the eggs out when the whites are just opaque and the yolks still wobble. Carryover heat from the hot plate keeps cooking them at the table, so residual firming is expected and should be allowed for.
- The "flat plate"The plate here has to go straight from oven to table, so something ovenproof is implied rather than dinner china. Use a small gratin dish, a shallow ceramic baker or a cast-iron pan; ordinary dinner china may crack at oven heat.
- Bacon thickness"Very thin" means the old-fashioned breakfast cut, not thick-cut. Fry it fully crisp before it goes under the egg, since it gets no meaningful further browning in the oven.
- Butter the dish generouslyThe set white will weld itself to the surface otherwise, and the dish is meant to be served in. Butter or fat from the bacon pan both work.
- SeasoningSalt on the yolk before baking can leave pale speckles; season the white and add salt to the yolk after. The finishing knob of butter is not decorative -- it glosses the surface and stops the white drying.
- YieldThe recipe scales by the egg: two very thin slices of bacon to each egg, with several pairs set out on one large plate.
- Doneness and raw yolkBaked this briefly the yolk stays runny. For anyone who should avoid undercooked eggs, bake until the yolk is firm throughout or use pasteurised eggs.
Baked or "shirred" eggs belong to the era when a hot oven was always going and kitchens owned dishes meant to travel from oven to table -- small earthenware bakers and tin plates. The instruction to serve in the baking dish reflects both convenience and physics: the whites toughen and the butter congeals if the eggs are moved, and the dish itself holds heat all the way to the table.