Home › Whites of Eggs › Baked Eggs
Baked Eggs
Spread a baking dish with butter, bread crumbs and chopped parsley and break the eggs into it, being careful to keep the yolks whole. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, pour over a little cream and dot with butter. Bake in the oven until the whites are set.
A plain set of baked eggs — what French cookery calls oeufs sur le plat and older American books call shirred eggs. The recipe gives no quantities, temperature or time, so the numbers below fill the gaps.
- The instruction that matters"Bake until the whites are set" is the whole recipe, and it happens fast. Pull the dish while the whites are just opaque and the yolks still tremble; residual heat in the buttered dish will carry them further as they travel to the table.
- Oven temperatureThe original assumes you know your range. Use 375F. Higher browns the crumbs before the whites coagulate; much lower and the yolks harden while the whites are still slack.
- TimingFor four to six eggs in a shallow dish, 10 to 14 minutes at 375F. Individual gratin dishes or ramekins run 8 to 10.
- The dishShallow and wide, not deep. A 9-inch pie plate, an oval gratin dish or individual ramekins all work. Depth is the enemy here — piled-up eggs steam rather than set evenly.
- QuantitiesFor six eggs: about 2 tablespoons butter for the dish plus more for dotting, 1/3 cup fine dry bread crumbs, 2 tablespoons chopped parsley, and 3 to 4 tablespoons cream. "A little cream" means enough to film the bottom, not to float the eggs.
- CreamCream of the period varied, and 'cream' in such books could mean anything from thin to thick; a richer cream is the safer reading here. Half-and-half or whole milk will work but is likelier to break into a watery layer under the whites.
- Breaking the eggsCrack each egg into a cup first and slide it into the dish. Cracking directly over hot buttered crumbs is how yolks break.
- Yield and servingTwo eggs per person as a light supper or breakfast dish. Serve straight from the baking dish with toast; reheated baked eggs are rubbery.
- Soft yolksEggs cooked this way leave the yolk barely warmed. Anyone avoiding undercooked egg — the very young, the pregnant, the immune-compromised — should bake until the yolk is firm, accepting firmer whites, or use pasteurized shell eggs.
Baked or "shirred" eggs were a standard of hotel and boarding-house breakfast cookery on both sides of the Atlantic, though the origin of the American name is not settled. The method is often said to have appealed to institutional kitchens because a dozen dishes could go into the oven at once and come out at the same moment, which spitting fat and a skillet never allowed. Its appearance in a meatless cookery book reflects the particular usefulness of eggs to that genre: books of this kind served Lenten and fast-day cooks, vegetarians of the health-reform movement, and, in the years around the First World War, households told to save meat for the army. Eggs, cream and butter carried the protein and richness that the absent bacon would have supplied, and the parsley and crumbs did the work of making a bare plate look composed.