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Eggs with Cheese
Cut hard-boiled eggs in half-inch slices. Arrange them on a well-buttered dish that has been rubbed with a shallot. Make a sauce of a tablespoonful of butter, a scant tablespoonful of flour, and three-fourths of a cupful of milk. Cook until it thickens, add a tablespoonful of grated Parmesan cheese, salt and pepper to taste. Pour the sauce over the eggs, sprinkle the top with equal quantities of cheese and bread crumbs, and set in a hot oven until the top is a rich golden brown. Serve in the same dish set inside another.
A small egg gratin built on a plain béchamel — the sort of dish a 1900 cook made from leftovers of a boiled-egg breakfast. It comes together in the time the oven takes to heat.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in books of this period is usually reckoned at roughly 400-450F. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so the only job is to brown the crumb topping -- a few minutes, or a minute or two under the broiler.
- Slice thicknessHalf-inch rounds are deliberate. Thinner slices break up under the sauce and the yolks crumble into it; keep them thick and lay them in a single overlapping layer.
- The shallot rubCut a shallot and wipe the buttered dish with the cut face. This is meant to leave a trace of flavour only, not pieces of raw allium. Garlic will do the same job with a heavier hand.
- Sauce proportionsOne tablespoon butter, a scant tablespoon flour and three-quarters of a cup of milk gives a fairly loose coating sauce, which is what you want. Cook the roux a minute before the milk goes in so the flour loses its raw taste, then simmer two or three minutes after it thickens.
- Cheese quantityA single tablespoon of Parmesan in the sauce is modest by present taste; two or three gives a more pronounced cheese flavour, and you may want less added salt if you increase it.
- ToppingEqual parts grated cheese and crumbs. Dry crumbs brown better than fresh; toss them with a little melted butter if the top looks pale after five minutes.
- Serving vessel"Serve in the same dish set inside another" describes a shallow gratin dish carried to table on a plate or in a second larger dish. A gratin dish on a folded napkin does the same.
- YieldThe quantity of sauce suggests three or four eggs, enough for two as a light supper. It scales directly: double everything for four, in a dish wide enough to keep the eggs in one layer.
Dishes of this kind -- cooked eggs napped in white sauce, dusted with cheese and crumbs, and browned -- appear in American and English household books of the later nineteenth century under names like eggs au gratin, eggs a la creme and eggs with cheese. They belong to the frugal end of the repertoire: a gratin was an accepted way to turn cold cooked food into a hot course. Parmesan was a common choice for such browned tops, and its use here reflects the period's taste for French-influenced cookery.