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Eggs with Parmesan
Cut eight hard boiled eggs into slices. Put two tablespoonfuls of butter in a frying pan, add two even tablespoonfuls of flour, mix until smooth, and add a half pint of cream and a half pint of stock; stir continually until it boils, then add four heaping tablespoonfuls of Parmesan, one ounce of butter, salt and pepper to taste, add the slices of hard boiled eggs and a tablespoonful of chopped parsley; mix, and turn into a baking dish. Crumb a slice of stale bread, and sprinkle over it sufficient melted butter to just moisten, strew this over the top, and brown in a quick Serve hot in the dish in which they are baked. oven.
A straightforward béchamel-and-cheese gratin of sliced hard-boiled eggs. The text has a printer's slip at the end — "brown in a quick" ... "oven" — the two halves of the sentence having been transposed.
- Quick ovenRead this as roughly 400–450°F. The dish is fully cooked when it goes in; the oven is only there to brown the crumbs, which takes 10–15 minutes. A few minutes under the broiler does the same job.
- Half a pintOne cup, so a cup of cream and a cup of stock — two cups of liquid to two tablespoons each of butter and flour. That is a deliberately loose sauce; it will thicken as it bakes and again as it cools.
- ParmesanFour heaping tablespoons of grated cheese is roughly an ounce to an ounce and a half. Grate it from a block of Parmigiano-Reggiano or grana padano; pre-grated shaker cheese usually carries an anti-caking agent, which can make the sauce grainy.
- Add the cheese off the boilThe recipe adds the Parmesan only after the sauce has come to a boil, though it does not say to take the pan off the heat. Hard cheese held at a boil can separate and go stringy, so it is safer to pull the pan from the heat before stirring in the cheese and the extra ounce of butter.
- StockMost likely a light homemade veal or chicken stock. Use unsalted or low-sodium chicken stock and salt at the end, since Parmesan brings a good deal of salt of its own.
- The eggsFold the slices in gently and briefly. Long cooking makes hard-boiled whites rubbery and the yolks chalky; the eggs need only to be heated through.
- CrumbsA slice of stale bread torn and pulsed gives about half a cup of coarse crumbs — enough for a thin layer. Moisten with a tablespoon or so of melted butter, no more, or the top bakes greasy rather than crisp.
- YieldServes four as a light main course or six as a first course. It must go to the table straight from the oven; the sauce sets and dulls quickly.
In an era when kitchens were coal-fired, summer cooking was an exercise in keeping the range lit as briefly as possible. Hard-boiled eggs were the standard workaround: boil a batch in the cool of the morning and the evening dish becomes an assembly job with only a few minutes of stovetop sauce and a brief browning. The technique is plain French — a roux, cream and stock, cheese stirred in at the end — and Parmesan was by then a familiar imported grating cheese in well-stocked American groceries, valued precisely because a hard cheese kept through the summer when soft cheeses would not. Dishes of this shape appear under names like "eggs au gratin," and this one is served in the dish it was baked in.