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Eggs for Breakfast
Heat in the oven a common white dish, large enough to hold the number of eggs to be cooked, allowing plenty of room for each. Melt in it a small piece of butter, break the eggs, one at a time, carefully in a saucer, and slip them in the hot dish. Sprinkle over them pepper and salt, and let them cook four or five minutes. It is a great improvement to allow to every two eggs a tablespoonful of cream, adding it when the eggs are first put in.--Mrs. A. M. D.
This is what most cooks now call shirred or baked eggs, and the method holds up unchanged. The original assumes a coal range and a cook who knows her oven, so the two things missing are a temperature and a reliable doneness cue.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. Around 350-375F suits this; hotter and the whites toughen and brown at the edges before the yolks warm through.
- The dish matters"A common white dish" most likely means ordinary white glazed crockery, earthenware or ironstone. A gratin dish, a pie plate or individual ramekins all work. The eggs should sit in one layer with room between them, as instructed.
- Preheat it emptyThe hinge of the recipe is that the dish goes into the oven first and the butter melts in it, so the whites begin to set the moment the eggs touch the surface. Slipping eggs into a cold buttered dish gives a slack, weeping result.
- Four or five minutes is shortThat timing assumes a thoroughly heated dish and eggs at room temperature. In practice expect 8 to 12 minutes in a 350F oven for whites that are just set with soft yolks. Judge by the white, which should be opaque with no clear liquid; the yolks continue to firm from residual heat in the hot dish after it leaves the oven.
- Break each egg into a saucerNot fussiness. It lets you catch a bad egg or a broken yolk before it joins the others, and it lets you slide the egg in flat rather than dropping it from height.
- The creamA tablespoon of cream to every two eggs, added at the start, buffers the whites from the hot dish and keeps them tender. Heavy or whipping cream is the safer choice; lighter cream may thin and pool.
- SeasoningSalt sprinkled directly on the yolks can leave pale speckles where it draws moisture. Season the whites, or salt after cooking, if appearance matters.
- YieldTwo eggs per person for breakfast. The recipe scales by the size of the dish rather than by any fixed quantity.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is built exactly like this entry: a short household method signed with initials, printed as its own small recipe. Baked eggs of this kind were standard on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century u2014 in America they were often called shirred eggs, though the origin of "shirr" in this sense is uncertain u2014 and they suited a household with a range already hot from the morning's baking better than fried eggs did, since the dish could go in, be forgotten for a few minutes and come to the table in the vessel it cooked in. The suggestion of cream is offered here as an improvement rather than a requirement.