Home › Egg Recipes › Eggs and Bacon
Eggs and Bacon
1/4 lb. bacon. 1 heaping tablespoonful (1 oz.) butter. 1/4 lb. mushrooms 4 poached eggs 1 tablespoonful finely chopped parsley 2 tablespoonfuls bread crumbs I heaping tablespoonful (I oz.) butter Salt and pepper Fry the bacon, then chop it and put it into a gratin dish. Peel the mushrooms and fry them lightly in butter, chop them, and lay them on the top of the bacon, sprinkle in a little salt and pepper. Poach
A gratin of bacon, mushrooms and poached eggs under buttered crumbs. The text as printed breaks off mid-word and the bacon never appears in the ingredient list, so a few gaps have to be filled from the method.
- The recipe is incompleteThe transcription stops at "Poach" and the finishing steps are missing. From the ingredients, the intended sequence is: lay the poached eggs on the mushrooms, scatter the parsley, cover with the crumbs, dot with the butter and brown.
- How much baconNo quantity is given; the bacon is missing from the ingredient list altogether and appears only in the method. For four eggs, something like 4 to 6 rashers (roughly 4 to 6 oz) fried crisp and chopped will fill the base of a small gratin dish without swamping the eggs.
- Gratin dishA shallow, wide, ovenproof dish he shything sits in one layer and the crumb top browns fast. Here the word is used for the dish itself ("put it into a gratin dish"), not for the technique.
- Browning temperatureThe finishing instruction is missing, so nothing survives about how the top was to be coloured; a crumbed gratin of this kind would have been browned in a hot oven or under a salamander. Five to eight minutes in a hot oven, or two minutes under a grill, is enough. Longer and the poached yolks set hard.
- Poaching aheadPoach the eggs while the bacon and mushrooms cook, and slip them into cold water to stop them. They will finish in the residual heat of the browning, so pull them from the poaching water while the yolk is still fully liquid.
- Peeling mushroomsPeriod cookery books commonly direct that mushrooms be peeled, and the caps then sold were often coarser and more discoloured than today's. Modern button or chestnut mushrooms only need wiping; peeling costs you flavour and a good deal of the mushroom.
- CrumbsThe recipe does not specify; for a crumb top that browns, dry fine stale white crumbs work better than fresh soft ones, which will steam over the wet mushrooms instead of crisping.
- YieldFour eggs, so four servings as a savoury or light supper course, or two as a main dish with bread.
History: Eggs on a bed of bacon under browned crumbs belongs to the British savoury and breakfast-dish tradition rather than to haute cuisine, and it is a close cousin of the many turn-of-the-century "eggs with —" gratins that stretched a few eggs and a scrap of bacon into a course. The instruction to peel mushrooms is one of the more datable things in it: cookery writers of the period routinely treated the skin as something to be got rid of.