Eggs in Batter
1 egg 1 1/2 tablespoons thick cream 1/4 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons fine stale bread crumbs Mix cream, bread crumbs, and salt. Put one-half tablespoon of mixture in egg-shirrer. Slip in egg, and cover with remaining mixture. Bake six minutes in moderate oven.
Curried Eggs I 3 "hard-boiled" eggs 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 cup hot milk 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon curry powder 1/8 teaspoon pepper Melt butter, add flour and seasonings, and gradually hot milk. Cut eggs in eighths lengthwise, and reheat in sauce.
A single shirred egg baked in a crumb-and-cream lining, from the era when every household had a set of small egg dishes. It comes together faster than the oven takes to preheat, so have everything measured first.
- The egg-shirrerA shirrer is a small shallow individual baking dish, in earthenware or metal. A ramekin, a small gratin dish or a cocotte does the same job; a deep straight-sided cup does not, since the egg needs to spread thin enough to set in the time given.
- Moderate ovenRead that as roughly 350-375F. Preheat fully — the six-minute timing assumes the dish goes into steady heat, and an oven still climbing will leave the white slack.
- Six minutes is deliberateThat should yield a set white and a yolk still fluid, which is the point of the dish. If you want the yolk firm, expect a few minutes more, but the crumb topping will brown further and the white can turn rubbery.
- Thick creamHeavy or whipping cream. Light cream or half-and-half carries more water, and the crumb mixture will be looser rather than holding as a bed.
- Stale bread crumbsDry crumbs from day-old white bread, ground fine — not panko, which is too coarse and open, and not seasoned packaged crumbs. Fresh soft crumbs will work but give a wetter, more pudding-like result.
- Do the math on the crumbsHalf a tablespoon goes underneath the egg and the rest on top, so the base layer is thin by design. Press it flat across the bottom of the dish before the egg goes in or the yolk will sit off-centre and cook unevenly.
- YieldOne dish, one egg, one person. Scale by making one shirrer per serving rather than one large dish, which changes the cooking time entirely.
- On the curried eggs that followThat second recipe is a plain butter-flour-milk sauce: cook the flour and curry powder in the butter for a minute before the milk goes in, which takes the raw edge off both. The eggs are only reheated in the finished sauce, not simmered, or the whites toughen.
Shirred eggs — baked in a shallow individual dish, sometimes with cream, crumbs, cheese or ham — were a fixture of American breakfast and luncheon cookery from the late nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth, and small ovenproof "egg-shirrers" were sold as kitchen equipment. The name is sometimes linked to the sense of "shirr" used in sewing, describing a gathered or puckered look, though the origin of the word is in fact uncertain; the dish itself is close to the French oeufs sur le plat. The pairing with a curried egg recipe on the same page is characteristic of the period: commercial curry powder was by then an ordinary pantry item in English and American kitchens, and cookbooks of this type generally used it as a seasoning stirred into a standard white sauce rather than as the basis of an Indian dish.