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Eggs in Ramequins
5 hard cooked eggs 1/4 lb. mushrooms 3 tablespoonfuls butter 1 pint (2 cups) white sauce 1/2 cupful cooked chopped ham A few bread crumbs 1/3 cupful melted butter Salt and pepper to season Peel the mushrooms and cut them into small pieces; cook them in the three tablespoonfuls of butter till the butter is absorbed, then add the white sauce and allow to simmer for a quarter of an hour. Add the ham and the cooked eggs, cut in slices; season nicely, and turn into well-buttered ramequins, cover with some bread crumbs mixed with the melted butter, and heat thoroughly in the oven.
Serve hot. 6 eggs
A straightforward gratin of egg, ham and mushroom in individual dishes, from the era when "casserole" cookery meant any covered baking vessel. Two details in the original need translating before you start.
- RamequinsIndividual ovenproof dishes, the same ramekins sold today; sizes varied then as now, and the recipe does not say how many it fills.
- The stray "6 eggs"The trailing line is an orphaned fragment; whether it is a yield note or a leftover from a neighbouring recipe cannot be determined. Five hard-cooked eggs is the working quantity, given in the ingredient list, and the method refers simply to "the cooked eggs."
- White sauceA pint means 2 cups of medium béchamel: 4 tablespoons butter, 4 tablespoons flour, 2 cups milk. It should coat a spoon heavily, since the filling has to hold together under a crumb crust rather than run.
- Peeling mushroomsStandard practice when mushrooms were field-gathered and gritty. Cultivated button or cremini mushrooms need only wiping; peeling costs you flavour and yield.
- "Till the butter is absorbed"The mushrooms will first release water, then reabsorb the fat as that water cooks off. Take them to that point and no sooner, or the sauce will thin out in the dish.
- The quarter-hour simmerFifteen minutes is for the sauce and mushrooms only, before the eggs go in. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir — a floury béchamel scorches on the bottom of the pan quickly.
- Adding the eggsFold the sliced hard-cooked eggs in off the heat and handle them gently. Extended cooking makes the yolks chalky and the whites rubbery; everything in the dish is already cooked at this stage.
- "Heat thoroughly in the oven"No temperature is given. A moderately hot oven for 15 to 20 minutes, until the filling bubbles at the edges and the crumbs are golden, will do it; a short pass under the broiler will finish the top if it is still pale.
- Butter for the crumbsA third of a cup of melted butter to "a few bread crumbs" is generous by modern taste. Use enough crumbs that they are evenly moistened and no butter pools — roughly a cup of coarse fresh crumbs.
Ramekin cookery was a fixture of Anglo-American entertaining around 1900, when individual portions baked and served in the same little dish read as both French and modern. The word came into English from French ramequin, whose own origin is uncertain — it is often traced to a Dutch or Low German rammeken, though that derivation is only a proposal — and it originally meant the cheese-and-bread preparation rather than the pot; by the time this book was printed the name had transferred almost entirely to the vessel. Dishes like this one belong to a distinct genre of the period — cooked eggs, a cream sauce and a little chopped meat, bound and browned — designed to use up the ends of a joint of ham and to stretch a small amount of protein across a luncheon or supper table.