Baked Eggs
Carefully break eggs in buttered granite pie pan, add salt, pepper and bits of butter; bake until white is set.
A one-line recipe that assumes you know your oven. The whole thing hinges on pulling the pan before the yolks tighten.
- Granite pie pan"Granite" here means graniteware — speckled enamel over sheet steel, standard cheap bakeware around 1900. Any shallow ovenproof dish works; a small ceramic gratin dish or individual ramekins give you more control than a full pie pan.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Use 350F. Hotter than about 375F sets the edges of the white to rubber before the center firms.
- TimingTen to fifteen minutes at 350F for two to four eggs in one dish, less in individual ramekins. Whites go from translucent to opaque quickly at the end, so check from about eight minutes.
- The doneness pointStop when the whites are just set and still trembling — the yolks should stay liquid. Carryover heat in the hot pan continues cooking for a minute or two after it leaves the oven, so err early.
- Butter the dish properlyEgg white welds itself to bare enamel or ceramic. Butter generously; a dish straight from a cold larder will slow the bake down.
- SeasoningSalt sprinkled directly on the yolk leaves pale speckles. Season the whites, or salt after baking.
- YieldTwo eggs per person for breakfast. Toast, or a spoonful of cream in the bottom of the dish, are common accompaniments.
- Soft yolksThe yolks are not fully cooked at this stage of doneness. If you are cooking for someone pregnant, elderly, very young, or immune-compromised, use pasteurized shell eggs or bake until the yolk is firm.
Baked eggs of this kind were long known as shirred eggs; the name is often said to come from a shallow dish called a shirrer, though the derivation is not securely established. They appear in American and English cookery books through the nineteenth century as a plain way to serve eggs without frying them in fat. The brevity of the instruction is typical of Reliable Recipes and books like it: these were community and promotional compilations written by cooks for cooks, and no one felt the need to specify an oven temperature when kitchen ranges had no thermometers and doneness was judged by eye. The specified "granite pie pan" helps date the page — graniteware, enameled steel produced in quantity from the 1870s onward, was among the first cheap, light, non-rusting bakeware to reach ordinary American kitchens, and cookbooks of the period name it the way a modern one might name nonstick.