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Baked Eggs with Cheese
4 whites of eggs 1 cup or four ounces grated cheese 1/4 teaspoon salt A few grains cayenne 1 cup fine, stale bread crumbs Break whites of eggs into buttered baking dish, or into ramequins, and cook them in a hot oven until they begin to turn white around the edge. Cover with the mixture of crumbs, cheese, and seasonings. Brown in a very hot oven. In preparing this dish, it is essential that the oven be very hot or the egg will be too much cooked by the time the cheese is brown. To avoid this, cover the eggs with white sauce before adding the crumbs.
The food value of this dish is very close to that of a pound of beef of average composition.
For those who are particularly fond of cheese the amount of cheese in this recipe may be very much increased, thus making a much more nourishing dish. Or the amount may be reduced so as to give hardly more than a suggestion of the flavor of cheese.
A thrift dish built on leftover whites, and one that lives or dies by oven heat. Read the temperature note before you start.
- The hinge: heat, not timeThe whites must set and the crumb topping must brown in the same short window. The book sets the whites in a "hot" oven and browns them in a "very hot" one, which is usually read as somewhere around 450-475F; work on the top rack. In a moderate oven the whites will be rubbery long before the cheese colors.
- Oven translationsPeriod usage varies, but "hot" is generally read as roughly 400-425F and "very hot" as 450F and above. Go by sight rather than the clock: the first stage is done as soon as the edges just turn opaque, and the browning takes only a few minutes more.
- The white sauce insuranceThe suggested layer of white sauce between egg and crumbs is worth doing. It insulates the whites and keeps them tender if your oven runs cool or your dish is deep. A few tablespoons of a thick bechamel per ramekin is enough.
- Cheese quantityThe book equates one cup grated with four ounces, about what a cup of grated Cheddar weighs; grate it fine so it melts before it scorches. Pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch and browns less cleanly.
- Stale crumbs matterFresh crumbs hold moisture and steam rather than crisp. Dry the bread out in a low oven first. Panko crisps in much the same way, though it is coarser than the "fine" crumbs called for.
- A few grains cayenneRead this as a pinch — about 1/8 teaspoon or less for the whole dish.
- Ramekins over one dishIndividual ramekins give a better ratio of browned top to set white and reduce the risk of overcooking. Four whites will fill two to four small ramekins depending on size.
- YieldServes two as a light main course with bread and a salad, or four as a first course. The "food value of a pound of beef" claim is a period nutritional flourish, not a portion guide.
This comes from a chapter devoted entirely to whites of eggs — the standing problem of a kitchen that used yolks freely in custards, sauces, mayonnaise and cakes and was left with a bowl of albumen that would not keep. Whole sections of early twentieth-century cookbooks exist to consume leftover whites, and this one turns them into something between a gratin and a savoury. The comparison to "a pound of beef of average composition" places the book squarely in the era of the new nutrition science, when American home economists were tabulating protein and calories from feeding studies and arguing that cheese and eggs could stand in for meat on both economic and dietary grounds. That argument was the whole premise of meatless cookery in this period, which grew out of vegetarian reform, Lenten and fast-day cooking, and, by the late 1910s, wartime campaigns to leave more meat for the army — less an ideology than a household budget.