Home › Cookery › Eggs a La Creme
Eggs a La Creme
Six eggs boiled hard and chopped fine, and stale bread. Put in a dish alternate layers of chopped egg and grated bread. When the dish is full, pour on one pint boiling milk seasoned with salt, pepper, and one tablespoonful butter. Bake a light brown.--Miss N.
A late-nineteenth-century supper dish built from hard-boiled eggs, dry bread and hot milk. It works, but the original leaves out the oven, the timing and the pan size.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F until the top is set and lightly browned, roughly 25 to 30 minutes in a shallow dish; the milk should be absorbed and just bubbling at the edges.
- "Grated bread"This means stale bread rubbed on a box grater into coarse crumbs, not the fine dried crumbs sold in canisters. Coarse crumbs from day-old white bread hold the custard and give the layers structure; commercial crumbs turn pasty.
- Pour the milk boilingThe hinge of the dish. Scalding milk swells the crumbs immediately and moistens the layers evenly, so the whole thing bakes soft throughout rather than as wet bread with dry patches. Note that there is no raw egg here: the eggs go in already hard-boiled, so the binding comes from the soaked bread, not from a set custard.
- Quantities and dish sizeThe recipe gives no dish size: it says to fill the dish with layers and then pour a pint of boiling milk over. Six eggs and an equal volume of crumbs come to about three cups of solids, so allow a dish of about a quart and a half. Aim for roughly equal volumes of chopped egg and crumbs, finishing with a crumb layer so the top browns.
- ButterA tablespoon melted into the hot milk is the whole of the enrichment. Dotting a little extra over the top crumb layer helps it colour evenly.
- Hard-boiled eggsCook them just to set — about 10 minutes off the boil, then cooled — since they get a second cooking in the oven. Overcooked yolks go chalky and grey-rimmed in the finished dish.
- SeasoningPeriod seasoning is salt and pepper only. Grated cheese, mustard or nutmeg are all reasonable additions but take it away from what Miss N. wrote.
- YieldServes four as a light supper or breakfast dish, two or three as a main. Best eaten hot; it firms considerably as it cools.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, is full of short recipes signed with an initial or a surname, and this one is typical of the book's economy: an assumption that the cook knows what a light brown looks like and how hot her stove is. The dish belongs to the large family of nineteenth-century American "scallops" — anything layered with crumbs, moistened, and baked — which are often said to have served to use up stale bread and to stretch a small amount of protein across a table. Eggs à la crème is French only in its name; the fashion for French titles on plain Anglo-American dishes seems to have been common enough in post-Civil War cookbooks, where a dish of chopped egg and breadcrumbs could be dressed up for company simply by what it was called.