Griddled Eggs
Heat a griddle as if for baking cakes; butter it lightly and arrange small muffin rings on it. Drop an egg in each and turn as soon as lightly browned. Griddled eggs resemble fried eggs but are far more delicate.
A one-line method that assumes a cook already has a griddle hot for breakfast cakes. The whole point is the low, even, dry heat of cast iron rather than a pool of fat.
- Griddle heat"As if for baking cakes" means a griddle hot enough to brown a pancake, which is likely hotter than eggs held in rings want. Run it lower, or the bottoms set and colour before the whites near the yolk have coagulated.
- Muffin ringsThese are plain metal bands, generally somewhere around 3 to 4 inches across and about an inch deep, sold today as crumpet or egg rings. Butter the inside of each ring as well as the griddle, or the white grips the metal and tears when you lift it.
- "Butter it lightly"Light means light. A thin film wiped on with paper is enough; a puddle of butter turns this back into a fried egg and defeats the delicacy the recipe is claiming.
- Turning themLift the ring off before you flip, using a cloth or tongs, then turn the egg with a thin spatula. Trying to turn egg and ring together is how the yolk breaks.
- DonenessPerhaps two to three minutes on the first side and thirty to sixty seconds after turning gives a set white and a soft yolk. If you want the yolk firm, cook it through rather than leaving it liquid, especially for anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; limit yourself to as many rings as fit on the griddle with room for a spatula between them, and turn them in the order they were dropped so none overcooks.
The recipe belongs to the era when a heavy iron griddle sat over the range through breakfast for cakes, and the cook simply annexed a corner of it for eggs. Muffin rings were standard equipment for English muffins and crumpets, so pressing them into service as egg moulds cost nothing. The claim that griddled eggs are "far more delicate" than fried is a period preference rather than a technical fact: cookbooks of the time frequently disparaged frying in fat as coarse and hard to digest, and recommended dry heat, poaching or steaming as the more refined treatment for eggs.