Home › Some Kitchen Kinks › Some Kitchen Kinks: Eggs
Some Kitchen Kinks: Eggs
Baked Eggs with Cheese. 4 eggs. 1 cupful, or 4 ounces, of grated cheese. 1 cupful of fine, soft, stale bread crumbs. 1/4 teaspoonful salt.
A few grains of cayenne pepper.
Break the eggs into a buttered baking dish or into ramekins and cook them in a hot oven until they begin to turn white around the edge. Cover with the mixture of crumbs, cheese, and seasonings. Brown in a very hot oven. In preparing this dish it is essential that the oven be very hot or the egg will be too much cooked by the time the cheese is brown. To avoid this, some cooks cover the eggs with white sauce before adding crumbs.
The food value of the dish is very close to that of a pound of beef of average composition. The estimated cost is about 14 cents.
For those who are particularly fond of cheese the amount of cheese APPENDIX in this recipe may be very much increased, thus making a much more nourishing dish. Or, the amount may be reduced so as to give hardly more than a suggestion of the flavor of cheese.
Scrambled Eggs with Cheese. 1/2 pound of cheese grated or cut into small pieces. 8 eggs. 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley.
A pinch of nutmeg. ½ teaspoonful of salt.
Beat the eggs slightly, mix them with the other ingredients, and cook over a very slow fire, stirring constantly, so that the cheese may be melted by the time the eggs are cooked. In food value the dish is equal to nearly 2 pounds of average beef. The calculated cost is about 30 cents.
Swiss Eggs. 4 eggs. 1/2 cupful of cream. 1 tablespoonful of butter.
Salt and pepper. 1/4 cupful of grated cheese.
Heat the butter and cream together, break in the eggs whole, sprinkle with salt and pepper. When nearly done, add the cheese. Serve on buttered toast. Strain the cream over the toast.
Three cheese-and-egg dishes from the era when cheese was promoted as a cheap substitute for meat. All three are quick, and all three fail in the same way if the heat is wrong.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe distinguishes a "hot oven" for setting the eggs from a "very hot oven" for browning; the book gives no figures, but period guides put these roughly in the 400-450F and 450-500F ranges, and a broiler will do the browning. The recipe is explicit about why: the topping has to brown before the egg is overcooked.
- The hinge: brown fast or lose the yolksSet the eggs only until the whites are milky at the rim, then top and blast them. If the topping browns slowly the yolks will be chalky. The white-sauce variant works because the sauce insulates the egg from the radiant heat.
- What "cheese" means hereAn unqualified "cheese" in an American book of this date is most likely a firm factory cheddar. The recipe equates a cupful with 4 ounces; go by the weight, since grate size changes the volume considerably.
- Soft stale crumbs, not dry crumbsThese are crumbs torn or rubbed from day-old bread, still slightly moist; the recipe asks for them fine as well as soft. Packaged dry breadcrumbs are drier and will scorch before the eggs are ready; butter them lightly if you use them at all.
- Scrambled eggs with cheese: the ratioHalf a pound of cheese to eight eggs is a very high proportion of cheese, closer to a loose fondue than to scrambled eggs. Grate it finely so it melts on the timetable the recipe assumes, keep the pan barely warm, and pull it off the heat while the eggs still look underdone.
- Salt to tasteThe scrambled eggs call for half a teaspoonful of salt, which matches the printed page. With half a pound of cheese in the pan, add the salt at the end and taste before serving.
- Swiss eggs are stovetop or oven, either way shallowButter and cream heated in a small skillet or a gratin dish, eggs broken in whole, cooked gently until the whites just set. Cover the pan for the last minute to set the tops rather than raising the heat, which curdles the cream.
- YieldThe baked eggs and Swiss eggs each serve two as a main course or four at breakfast; the scrambled eggs serve four. The dish costs and the comparisons to "average beef" are early twentieth-century nutrition-bulletin arithmetic and can be ignored.
The costings and the habit of rating each dish against a weight of beef are characteristic of United States Department of Agriculture food bulletins of the early twentieth century, which promoted cheese as an economical protein and printed tables comparing its food value to meat pound for pound. That was the argument of the day: cheese was cheap, keeping, and nutritionally respectable, and the government wanted households to treat it as a main dish rather than a relish. "Swiss eggs" corresponds to oeufs a la suisse, eggs set in cream with grated cheese, a relative of shirred eggs; the name is usually taken to refer to the cheese rather than to any documented Swiss origin. The running head "APPENDIX" caught in the middle of the first recipe is a printer's artefact of the compilation.