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Shirred Egg
Beat one egg very slightly with a fork, add a tablespoon of milk, and mix. Pour into a hot pan where a teaspoon of butter has melted. Stir constantly with the fork until thick and creamy. Serve on hot buttered toast.
A single soft-scrambled egg, written for someone feeding a convalescent one plate at a time. It takes about three minutes and rewards a low flame.
- The name is misleadingA shirred egg elsewhere means an egg baked whole in a shallow dish with cream. What is described here is soft scrambled egg, stirred in a pan. Do not go looking for a ramekin.
- Heat is the hingeThe recipe says "a hot pan," but a single egg with a tablespoon of milk will set almost at once on high heat and tend toward dry curd; for the creamy texture the recipe asks for, keep the flame gentle.
- Stop before it looks donePull the pan while the egg still glistens and looks slightly underset. Residual heat in the pan and the egg finishes it on the way to the plate.
- The teaspoon of butterThat is roughly 5 g, enough to film a small pan and no more. In a nonstick pan you can halve it; without a nonstick surface it is what keeps the egg off the metal.
- Milk proportionOne tablespoon to one egg is a light hand and correct — more milk makes the curds weep on the toast. Cream may be substituted in the same quantity for a richer result.
- YieldOne serving, and deliberately so. Scale by cooking each portion separately rather than crowding the pan; a single egg's worth of curd is what allows constant stirring to work.
- The toast mattersButtered toast under wet egg softens quickly. Toast it dark, butter it at the last second, and plate the egg immediately.
Single-egg dishes of this kind belong to the invalid-cookery tradition, a standard fixture of American and British household manuals through the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when nursing the sick happened at home and the cook was expected to produce small, bland, easily digested dishes on demand. Eggs, milk, beef tea, gruel, arrowroot and toast made up much of the repertoire, chosen on the then-current view that a weakened stomach needed food that was soft, warm and unspiced. The single beaten egg suited the category well: cheap, quick, and nourishing. The loose use of "shirred" here -- for a scrambled egg rather than a baked one -- is a reminder that egg terminology in nineteenth-century cookbooks was less fixed than it later became, and that the same word could mean different things from one book to the next.