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Baked Eggs
Butter baking dish or platter, or individual ramekin dishes. Break each egg into a cup and drop into baking
The text as printed breaks off mid-sentence, so what survives is the setup rather than the whole method. What follows fills in the standard practice of the period for baked or shirred eggs.
- The recipe is incompleteThe entry stops at "drop into baking" — presumably "baking dish." No oven temperature, time, or seasoning survives on this page. Treat it as a technique note, not a full set of instructions.
- Oven heatThe surviving text gives no oven term or temperature. Baked eggs of this kind were generally done in what period books call a moderate oven, usually rendered today as somewhere around 350-375F. Much hotter and the whites toughen at the edges before the yolks warm through.
- Why the cupBreaking each egg into a cup first is the one instruction that matters here. It lets you catch a bad egg or a broken yolk before it joins the others in the dish, and it lets you slide the egg in without spreading the white across the whole platter.
- Ramekin dishesA ramekin here is presumably the small individual earthenware or china dish of the sort still sold today, though in books of this period the word can also name a cheese preparation. A shallow gratin dish or a pie plate works for the communal version; depth is the enemy, since a deep pool of white sets unevenly.
- DonenessWhites set at roughly 145F and yolks thicken from about 150F. Eight to twelve minutes at 350F gives set whites and soft yolks, depending on dish material and how many eggs are in it. The eggs carry over after they leave the oven, so pull them a shade underdone.
- What usually went with themPeriod versions of this dish commonly finish with salt, pepper, a dot of butter, and often a spoonful of cream or a dusting of grated cheese or crumbs over each egg before baking. None of that is visible in the surviving text.
- YieldTwo eggs per person for a lunch or supper dish, one if the eggs are an adjunct to something else.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of the many turn-of-the-century cookbooks published by a food firm as advertising that happened to be genuinely useful. Baked eggs of this kind are close kin to the French oeufs sur le plat, eggs cooked and served in the same shallow vessel; American books of the era also call them shirred eggs, though the origin of "shirred" in this culinary sense is uncertain. Baked eggs were a light middle-of-the-day or supper dish.