Eggs au Gratin
Arrange Dropped Eggs on a shallow buttered dish.
Sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese. Pour over eggs one pint Yellow Béchamel Sauce. Cover with stale bread crumbs, and sprinkle with grated cheese. Brown in oven. Tomato or White Sauce may be used. 1 egg
A gratin built on poached eggs rather than baked ones, which means the eggs are already cooked when they go into the dish and the oven's only job is to brown the top. Everything hinges on keeping that browning brief.
- Dropped Eggs means poachedFarmer's "Dropped Eggs" are eggs slipped into barely simmering salted water and cooked until the whites set, about three to five minutes. Lift them with a slotted spoon and drain well on a towel, or the sauce will thin out in the dish.
- Brown fast, not slowThe eggs are already done, so the oven's only job is to colour the crumbs. The book gives no temperature; a hot oven for a few minutes, or a spell under the broiler until the crumbs colour, is enough. A long stay in a moderate oven will overcook the eggs.
- Yellow BechamelThe book's yellow bechamel appears to be ordinary bechamel enriched with beaten egg yolk, which is what colours it; if so, add the yolk off the heat and do not return it to a hard boil or it will curdle. A pint is two cups, which is generous; a cup and a half suits four eggs.
- Stale bread crumbsSoft crumbs from day-old bread, torn or grated, not the fine dry sand sold in canisters. Toss them with a little melted butter before scattering them on, otherwise the top browns unevenly and tastes dusty.
- That trailing "1 egg"The stray "1 egg" is not an ingredient for the sauce; it most likely indicates a quantity per serving, though the page does not explain it. Count one egg per person for a light supper dish, two for a main course, and scale the sauce accordingly.
- Parmesan then and nowGrated Parmesan in 1896 was firm imported cheese, closer to today's Parmigiano-Reggiano than to pre-grated tubs. It goes on twice here, once under the sauce and once over the crumbs, and the second layer is what gives the crust its savour.
- Shallow dish, close fitUse a gratin dish or pie plate just large enough to hold the eggs in one layer without crowding. Depth is the enemy: a deep dish keeps the eggs in hot sauce long after the crumbs are brown.
- The sauce variationsTomato sauce or plain white sauce both work, as the recipe states. Either way keep the quantity to what will just cloak the eggs.
Au gratin means nothing more than "with a browned crust" -- from the French gratter, to scrape, originally the crusty scrapings from the bottom of the dish rather than any particular cheese. By the time Fannie Farmer compiled the Boston Cooking School Cook Book in 1896, the formula of sauce, crumbs and grated cheese finished in a hot oven had become one of the standard American ways to make a substantial dish out of very little, and her egg chapter runs through dozens of these small permutations built on the same handful of base sauces. The cross-references are the point: a cook who had already learned Dropped Eggs and Bechamel on earlier pages could assemble this in minutes, which is exactly the systematic, building-block teaching method the Boston Cooking School was known for. Dishes like this also belonged to the era's meatless supper and luncheon repertoire, when eggs were the respectable centre of a light evening meal.