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Eggs in a Nest
Separate the white from the yolk, beat the whites until stiff, sprinkle lightly with salt, heap onto a slice of toast. Make a depression in the center, drop into this the whole yolk, place a pan in the oven for about 2 minutes, put a tiny piece of butter in the center of each, and serve at once. (Pretty dish to serve to a child.)
A single-serving invalid dish: a meringue of beaten white baked briefly on toast with the whole yolk sitting in a hollow. It comes together in minutes, and nearly everything that can go wrong goes wrong in the beating and the timing.
- The hinge: don't overbakeTwo minutes is not a misprint. The point is to set the surface of the meringue while the yolk stays whole and liquid. Left longer, the white collapses and weeps and the yolk turns chalky.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, which is common in recipes of this period. A moderate oven, around 350F, should brown the peaks lightly in two to three minutes; under a broiler it will take well under a minute and needs watching.
- "Place a pan in the oven"Meaning set the assembled toast on a baking sheet or pie tin and put that in the oven. Nothing is baked in a covered dish.
- Beating the whiteOne white beats up more reliably in a small bowl, and any trace of yolk or grease will keep it from stiffening. Room-temperature whites whip faster than cold ones.
- Salt timingSalt beaten in from the start slows the whites' foaming and weakens the foam, so sprinkling lightly at the end, as the recipe directs, is the safer order.
- The toastUse a firm, well-dried slice. Soft fresh bread will go soggy under the wet white before the pan reaches the oven, and the nest slumps off the edge.
- YieldOne egg, one slice, one eater. Scale by the egg; the whites of two or three can be beaten together and divided among the slices.
- Runny yolk and vulnerable eatersTwo minutes leaves the yolk essentially raw. That is fine for most people, but this dish was written for invalids and small children — precisely the group advised today to avoid undercooked eggs. Pasteurized shell eggs remove the question.
Sick-room or invalid cookery was a standard chapter in North American community cookbooks well into the twentieth century, when nursing happened at home and the cook was expected to produce something light, bland and tempting for a patient with no appetite. Eggs were the workhorse of that chapter: cheap, soft, quickly digested and endlessly variable beaten in milk, poached, coddled, or dressed up like this. The appeal here is frankly visual, which the parenthetical admits; the recipe itself claims only that it makes a pretty dish to serve to a child. Versions of the same trick appear elsewhere under names like "birds' nest eggs." The Philathea name comes from the Baraca–Philathea movement, the network of adult Sunday-school classes that began in the 1890s (Baraca in 1890, Philathea shortly after; Philathea for the women, Baraca for the men) whose local chapters raised funds by compiling and selling books of members' recipes.