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Just add chicken livers tossed in brown gravy to shirred eggs and smother with creamed mushrooms.
You can order eggs in any language just by drawing an oval.
If you're going far away from domestic or wild eggs take powdered egg along. It's shipped from the Orient by the boatload, for the use of bakers.
Alligator eggs and deep sea turtle eggs, are somewhat salt-watery inside and about the size of a billiard ball outside. The chief drawback is that they're nearly all yolkand that's fattening. There's no fat, however, in egg whites. An egg has about 100 calories, go of them in the yolk, so reducers can eat g egg whites to 1 yolk.
The dish itself is one sentence: shirred eggs built up with chicken livers and creamed mushrooms. The surrounding notes on egg nutrition and exotic eggs are period commentary rather than instruction.
- What shirred eggs areEggs broken into a buttered shallow dish and baked, not stirred. A ramekin or small gratin dish per person, about a tablespoon of butter or cream in the bottom, two eggs on top.
- Oven temperatureBake at 350F for 10-12 minutes, until the whites are set and the yolks still loose. The residual heat of the dish keeps cooking them after they come out, so pull them a shade early.
- Order of assemblyHave the livers and the creamed mushrooms both hot and finished before the eggs go in the oven. Cold toppings spooned over baked eggs will chill the whites and force you to overcook them recovering the heat.
- The liversTrim green spots and connective tissue, sear in hot fat two to three minutes a side, and finish in the gravy. Chicken livers are done at a faint blush in the centre; held longer in gravy they turn dry and chalky.
- Brown gravyA simple roux-thickened brown sauce from pan drippings or beef stock. Roughly a cup will coat the livers for four servings.
- Creamed mushroomsSliced mushrooms cooked dry until they release and reabsorb their liquid, then bound with a few tablespoons of cream or thin bechamel. Cook off the water first or the eggs sit in a puddle.
- Powdered eggDried whole egg is still sold, now mainly to bakers and campers as the text suggests. Package directions vary by brand, roughly one to two and a half tablespoons of powder with a similar amount of water per egg, and it is best in batters rather than in anything meant to stand alone as eggs.
- Alligator and sea turtle eggsBoth are off the table now. Sea turtles are protected under international and national law, and alligator eggs are taken only under state licence; neither is a shopping option.
- YieldThe text gives no quantities; by convention two eggs make one portion. Figure a generous quarter pound of livers and a quarter pound of mushrooms per two servings.
The dish itself is a camp reading of the hotel breakfast plate: shirred eggs were a standard of American restaurant and club cookery from the late nineteenth century onward, and dressing them with chicken livers and creamed mushrooms is the familiar chafing-dish vocabulary of that era. The nutritional asides date the page as much as the slang does, coming from the stretch when calorie counting had reached the popular press and egg whites were being promoted to "reducers." The claim that dried egg arrived from the Orient by the boatload for bakers is also of its time: large-scale Chinese dried and frozen egg exports supplied the American baking trade for decades before the Second World War.