Alpine Eggs
INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 6 persons.-6 eggs, 1/2 lb. of cheese, 3 oz. of butter, chopped parsley, seasoning of pepper and salt. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 2d.
Butter a shallow tin and line it with nearly all the cheese cut in slices, break over this the eggs without breaking the yolks, and season. Grate what remains of the cheese and mix it with the parsley; lay this over the top, and upon on it put the remainder of the butter, cut in little pieces. Bake in a quick oven 10 minutes.
TIME.-10 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A baked egg dish that stands or falls on how far you let the whites go. Everything else is assembly.
- On the cheese quantityThe printed page was checked: the recipe calls for half a pound of cheese, as our text now gives. Most of it lines the tin in slices, with the remainder grated over the top.
- Quick oven425-450F. The point of the high heat is to set the whites and colour the top layer of cheese before the yolks firm.
- Ten minutes is a starting point, not a finish lineAt 450F six eggs on a bed of cheese will often need 12-15 minutes for the whites to set, since the cheese layer insulates them from the tin. Pull the dish when the whites are opaque and the yolks still wobble; carryover heat in the hot cheese continues cooking them.
- The tin"A shallow tin" means a shallow ovenproof dish or a metal pie tin, not a loaf tin. Choose one wide enough that the six eggs sit in a single layer without crowding, roughly 9 to 10 inches.
- The cheese to useBeeton's household cheese here would be a firm English Cheddar or Cheshire. Anything that melts to an oil slick, such as a young mozzarella, will flood the dish; a well-aged hard cheese gives the base structure the eggs need to sit on.
- Butter and seasoning3 oz is 6 tablespoons, most of it dotted over the top. Salt lightly given the cheese, and season the eggs before the second cheese layer goes on rather than after.
- ServingSix eggs serves six as a savoury or light supper course, three or four as a main dish with bread. It must go to the table straight from the oven; reheated, the whites turn to rubber.
- The cost line1s 2d is the Victorian retail cost for the whole dish, not a modern price. It is there because Beeton's readers were budgeting per dish, and it is a fair signal that this was cheap food.
The "Alpine" name is decorative rather than geographical; Victorian cookery books commonly attached Swiss or Alpine labels to cheese dishes, though no particular link to Gruyere or Emmental can be shown for this one. Beeton's cost and seasonality lines are the giveaway to the book's purpose: it was written for a mistress of the house planning menus and accounts, and a dish costing 1s 2d and "seasonable at any time" was exactly what she needed to fill a gap.