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EGGS (Dish sprinkle with salt)
dish, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and bake in a moderate oven - five minutes for soft-cooked and ten for hardcooked. Eggs are more delicately cooked if dish is placed in a pan of hot water in the oven, and water kept below the boiling point during cooking.
Chopped red or green pepper sprinkled over top of baked eggs is delicious.
This is the tail end of a recipe for shirred (baked) eggs — the missing opening would have told you to butter a shallow dish and break the eggs into it. What survives is the part that matters: oven, timing, and the water bath.
- A moderate ovenIn books of this period that usually means somewhere around 350-375F. At that heat the whites set from the outside in without the edges browning and toughening.
- The water bath is the hingeThe instruction to set the dish in a pan of hot water and keep it below boiling is the difference between a custardy baked egg and a rubbery one. Egg white begins to set around 145-150F and yolk a little above that; water held below boiling moderates the heat reaching the dish, so the eggs set more slowly and evenly, though they can still overcook if left too long.
- Five and ten minutes are optimisticThose times assume a shallow individual dish, eggs at room temperature, and a preheated oven. With a cold dish or eggs straight from the refrigerator, expect to need noticeably longer. Judge by the white: opaque and just wobbling at the centre means done, since carryover heat continues in the hot dish.
- The dishIndividual ramekins, small gratin dishes or a shallow buttered pie plate all work. Depth is what matters — anything much over an inch of egg cooks unevenly.
- Seasoning orderSalt scattered on the raw yolk can leave pale speckles where it draws moisture. Salt the white, or season after baking if that bothers you.
- The peppersChopped raw sweet pepper will not soften in five to ten minutes in a moderate oven. Soften it in butter first, or accept it as a crisp garnish added at the end.
- YieldTwo eggs per person in one dish is a serving; four to six eggs in a single shallow dish serves two or three with toast.
Baked eggs travel under several names — shirred in American books, oeufs en cocotte or sur le plat in French ones — and the technique is old enough that cookbooks of this period assumed the reader knew the outline and needed only the timings. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer. The advice to surround the dish with hot water is the same bain-marie principle applied to custards and timbales, and it reflects a kitchen where oven heat was uneven and unmeasured — the water, not the oven dial, was the thermostat.