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Eggs with Cream
1/2 pint (I cup) cream Salt and pepper 1/4 lb. thinly cut bacon I heaping tablespoonful (I oz.) butter Spread the butter on the bottom of a shallow fireproof dish, pour in the cream, sprinkle in a little salt and pepper, break the eggs carefully into the dish; partly cook the bacon in front of the fire, then place it on the top of the eggs.
Bake for ten minutes and serve hot.
This dish may be prepared in small casseroles, allowing one egg to each dish.
A shirred-egg dish from a book written when "casserole" still meant the vessel rather than the meal. The ingredient list omits the eggs themselves; work backwards from the note at the end, one egg per small dish, or four to six eggs in one shallow dish that holds a cup of cream.
- The hinge: shallow and hotBaked eggs set from the bottom up, and some cooks warm the buttered dish and cream in the oven for two or three minutes before breaking in the eggs. The recipe as written does not do this; the eggs go straight into cold cream.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, suits the ten minutes specified; much hotter and the cream is liable to separate around the edges before the whites have caught up.
- "Half a pint (1 cup)"An imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, somewhat more than a US cup, so the author's own parenthesis is the easier figure to work with. Use heavy or double cream; thinner creams are likelier to separate under the heat.
- "In front of the fire"Bacon was propped before an open grate to render and firm without crisping. A minute or two per side in a dry skillet, or a short spell under the broiler, does the same. It should still be limp when it goes on the eggs, since it finishes in the oven.
- Quarter pound of thin baconRoughly four to eight thin rashers, depending on cut and thickness: fewer if they are British-style back, more if they are thin American streaky. Cut to fit whatever dish you are using rather than draping it whole.
- SaltSeason the cream, not the eggs. Salt sprinkled directly on a yolk mottles it, and the bacon brings plenty of its own, so keep the hand light.
- Doneness and timingThe recipe gives ten minutes for the shallow dish; individual casseroles may want a little less and a deeper dish a little more. Pull it while the centres still tremble, as carryover heat in a hot fireproof dish keeps cooking them at the table.
- YieldThe recipe never says. A cup of cream and a quarter pound of bacon suggest something in the range of four to six servings, with toast to take up the cream.
Baked or "shirred" eggs belong to the era of the fireproof earthenware dish, which arrived in domestic kitchens in force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The French name for the technique, oeufs en cocotte, refers to the little individual pot, and the instruction here to divide the mixture into small casseroles with one egg apiece is the same idea in English dress. The direction to cook the bacon "in front of the fire" dates the text neatly: it assumes an open range in the room, even as it assumes an oven reliable enough to be trusted with cream and eggs for a measured ten minutes.