Eggs in Batter
1½ tablespoons thick cream 2 tablespoons fine stale ¼ teaspoon salt bread crumbs Mix cream, bread crumbs, and salt. Put one-half tablespoon of mixture in egg-shirrer. Slip in egg, and cover with remaining mixture. Bake six minutes in moderate oven. 3 "hard-boiled " eggs 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour Curried Eggs I ¼ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon curry powder 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 cup hot milk Melt butter, add flour and seasonings, and gradually hot milk. Cut eggs in eighths lengthwise, and reheat in sauce.
Two short egg dishes: a baked egg set in a cream-and-crumb bed, and hard-boiled eggs reheated in a curry-seasoned white sauce. Both are quick, and both fail in the same way — overcooking.
- The egg-shirrerA shirrer is a small shallow individual dish, usually earthenware or tinned metal, holding one egg. A 4-inch ramekin, a small gratin dish, or a cast-iron egg pan does the same job. Butter it well; the crumb mixture sticks.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 350F, though the book gives no temperatures. Six minutes should leave the white barely set and the yolk liquid in a preheated dish; a cold dish will need longer. Watch it rather than the clock, since the crumb topping hides the white.
- Quantities per eggThe cream, crumbs and salt appear to be meant for a single egg, though the recipe states no yield. Multiply for more, but bake in separate dishes rather than one large one -- the timing does not scale.
- Thick creamHeavy cream rather than a thin pouring cream. Anything thinner soaks into the crumbs and leaves the egg sitting in liquid.
- Stale bread crumbsFine dry crumbs from day-old bread, not the coarse fresh crumbs sold in tubs and not panko. Dry crumbs absorb the cream and hold their shape over the egg.
- Curried eggs: the sauceTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to a cup of milk is a medium white sauce. Cook the flour in the butter before the milk goes in, and add the curry powder with the flour, as the recipe directs, so the spices cook in the fat rather than tasting raw and dusty.
- Reheat, do not simmerThe hinge of the second dish. Hard-boiled eggs held in hot sauce for more than a couple of minutes go rubbery and the yolks turn chalky. Fold the wedges in off the heat and serve at once, over toast or rice.
- YieldCurried Eggs I serves two as a light supper, three at a stretch. The cup of milk gives just enough sauce to coat three eggs.
Shirred eggs -- baked in a shallow individual dish, often on a bed of crumbs, cream or minced ham -- were a familiar breakfast and luncheon dish in American cookbooks of this period, and egg-shirrers were sold as kitchen equipment. The curried eggs alongside them show how far curry powder had been absorbed into Anglo-American cooking: it appears here not as a foreign dish but as a seasoning for the same butter-flour-milk sauce that carried creamed chicken, creamed codfish and creamed everything else. The method of teaching one sauce and then varying it is why a page of egg cookery so often ends in a cup of hot milk and two tablespoons of flour.