Home › Whites of Eggs › Whites of Eggs Sur Le Plat
Whites of Eggs Sur Le Plat
4 whites of egg A little butter 2 tablespoons milk Salt Butter a pie dish or china souffle dish, put in the milk, pepper and salt, and drop the whites of egg into the dish, and bake in the oven in a tin of water till the whites are just set.
A frugal little dish for using up egg whites, baked gently in a water bath. The whole trick is low, even heat.
- The hinge: gentle heatEgg white sets at around 145-150F and turns rubbery and weeping if pushed much beyond that. The tin of water is not optional; it keeps the dish from ever getting hotter than the surrounding water.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 325F, or 300F if your oven runs hot. Whites are just set when they are opaque and barely tremble in the centre, roughly 12-18 minutes depending on the depth of the dish.
- Missing from the ingredient listPepper appears in the method but not in the list of ingredients above it. Season the milk with both salt and pepper before the whites go in.
- "Sur le plat"French for "on the plate" -- eggs baked and served in the same shallow dish. The original allows either a pie dish or a china souffle dish.
- Butter the dish properlyEgg white glues itself to bare ceramic. Butter generously right up the sides, and dot a little more on top before baking so the surface does not dry to a skin.
- YieldFour whites in one dish serves one as a light supper or two as a first course. Individual ramekins, two whites each, bake faster -- check at 8 minutes.
- ServingBland on its own. Grated cheese, a spoonful of cream, chopped herbs or a little paprika over the top before baking all sit well within the spirit of the original.
Books of this era generated egg whites the way modern kitchens generate stale bread: custards, mayonnaise, sauces and rich puddings all called for yolks alone, and a thrifty cook was left with a bowl of whites and no wish to waste them. Hence a recipe headed "Whites of Eggs". Cooking eggs sur le plat -- in a shallow dish, served in the vessel they were cooked in -- was a standard French method that English-language cookbooks appear to have taken up in the nineteenth century, usually with whole eggs; applying it to whites alone is the economising twist.