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Baked Eggs for Dinner
Have ready eight or ten hard-boiled eggs, a cup of light grated bread crumbs, butter, pepper and salt. Place in a buttered pudding dish a layer of sliced eggs, dotted with bits of butter, and sprinkled with salt and pepper; next a layer of bread crumbs, and so on to the top, being careful to let the top layer be of bread crumbs.--Mrs. A. M. D.
A scalloped-egg dish of the plainest kind: the recipe gives no oven temperature, no baking time and no sauce, all of which were assumed knowledge in 1879. Here is what to supply.
- Oven and timeThe receipt gives neither. As a modern equivalent, bake at about 350F for roughly 20 minutes, until the top crumbs are browned and the dish is heated through. Everything in it is already cooked, so you are only browning and warming.
- "Light grated bread crumbs"Not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Grate a day-old loaf on a box grater for soft, airy crumbs; they take butter better and brown without turning to grit.
- The dish will be dry as writtenWith only butter between the layers, this bakes stiff. Many period receipts for scalloped eggs pour half a cup of milk, cream or white sauce over the whole before the last crumb layer. This recipe does not say to, but the result is markedly better if you do.
- Butter generouslyThe butter is the only fat and the only real seasoning vehicle. Reckon on 3 to 4 tablespoons in total across the layers, plus more dotted over the crumb top so it browns rather than dries.
- Slicing the eggsCool the hard-boiled eggs completely and use a thin wet blade or an egg slicer. Warm eggs crumble and the yolks fall out of the layers.
- "Pudding dish"In period use this was a deep-sided earthenware baking dish; for this recipe use something roughly the size of what would now be called a 1 to 1.5 quart gratin dish. Ten eggs need a wide dish rather than a deep one, or the middle layers never heat.
- YieldEight to ten eggs serves four to six as a light main dish, more as a side. In a Virginia household of the period this would have gone on the table alongside other dishes, not alone.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, credits many of its receipts to initials rather than names, and Mrs. A. M. D. is one of many such anonymous hands. Layered egg-and-crumb dishes appear across nineteenth-century American cookbooks under names like scalloped eggs and eggs au gratin, and they belong to a family of thrift dishes built on hard-boiled eggs, which kept for days in a cool larder and could be stretched with bread. The dish also reflects the rhythm of a household that kept poultry: eggs came in surges, and a receipt using ten at once was a way of using a surplus rather than an extravagance.