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Eggs a La Suisse
Take a shallow baking dish and put 2 large tablespoons of butter in a little bit of milk, then layer of grated cheese, break a number of eggs carefully and put them in the dish, being careful to keep them separate, season with salt and pepper, sprinkle cheese on top, put in oven and as soon as cheese is brown, serve.
A shirred-egg dish of the plainest kind: butter, cream or milk, cheese, eggs, more cheese, heat. The original gives no oven temperature, no quantity of milk and no egg count, so most of the work is filling in the blanks.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Baked eggs of this type want a moderate oven, 350-375F. Much hotter and the cheese topping colors long before the whites have set.
- The browning cue is unreliable"As soon as the cheese is brown" is the recipe's only doneness test, and it can arrive well before the eggs are ready. Judge by the whites: opaque and just firm, yolks still soft, roughly 10-15 minutes. If the eggs are set and the top is still pale, finish under the broiler for a minute.
- "A little bit of milk"Genuinely vague. Enough to film the bottom of the dish, about 2-3 tablespoons for a dish holding six eggs. Cream or half-and-half holds together better than milk, which can separate and go watery around the whites.
- Two large tablespoons of butterTablespoon measures in older cookbooks were not standardised, and 'large' here most likely means heaped rather than level. Read it generously -- an ounce or a little more -- and use it to coat the dish thoroughly rather than leaving it in a lump.
- The cheese"A la Suisse" points to Gruyere or Emmental, both of which melt smoothly and brown well. Roughly 3-4 oz grated in total, split between the base layer and the top.
- Keeping the eggs separateBreak each egg into a cup first and slide it into place. Yolks broken in the dish will bleed and the thing becomes scrambled eggs under cheese.
- Dish and yieldA shallow gratin dish or a 9-inch pie plate takes six eggs in a single layer without crowding; eggs stacked or overlapping cook unevenly. Six eggs serves three at breakfast, or two as a supper dish with bread and a salad.
Eggs baked in a buttered dish with cream were called shirred eggs in American cookbooks and oeufs sur le plat in French ones, and the label "a la Suisse" was often used as shorthand for anything finished with Alpine cheese: Gruyere, Emmental, or whatever the local grocer sold as "Swiss." Versions circulated widely in English-language household manuals, usually differing only in whether the cheese went under the eggs, over them, or both.