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Baked Eggs Espagnole
6 eggs
4 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons chopped onion
¼ cup bread-crums
3 tablespoons chopped green
½ cup grated cheese pepper
Fry onion and pepper in the butter until slightly brown, then pour into a baking-dish. Break the eggs into the dish, being careful not to break the yolks. Mix the crums with the cheese and sprinkle over the eggs. Bake in a moderate oven (350° F.) until the eggs are set, but not hard. Serve in the dish in which they were baked.
A simple shirred-egg dish that survives translation intact. The only real obstacle is the ingredient list, which was set in two columns and has been scrambled into a single run of text.
- Untangling the ingredientsRead it as: 6 eggs, 4 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons chopped onion, 3 tablespoons chopped green pepper, 1/4 cup breadcrumbs, 1/2 cup grated cheese. The stray "pepper" at the end of the list belongs to "green pepper" on the line above.
- The ovenThe book supplies the Fahrenheit figure itself. 350F is right; much hotter and the whites toughen at the edges before the centres set.
- CrumsSimply an older spelling of crumbs. Dry crumbs from stale bread, not the soft fresh sort, which will go pasty under the cheese.
- The cheeseUnspecified, as often in American books of this period; a firm yellow store cheese is the likely intention. A sharp cheddar is the closest match; Gruyere or a dry Jack also work.
- Dish sizeSix eggs in a single layer need a shallow gratin or pie dish of roughly nine or ten inches. Crowded into anything deeper, the whites pool and the yolks overcook before the bottoms set.
- Doneness"Set, but not hard" means whites just opaque and yolks still soft, usually 12 to 18 minutes depending on the dish. The residual heat of the baking dish keeps cooking the eggs after they leave the oven, so pull them a shade underdone.
- YieldSix eggs serves three as a main course with toast, or six as part of a larger breakfast.
"Espagnole" here appears to signal nothing more than the green pepper and onion; American cookbooks of the period often used Spanish, Espagnole and Creole loosely for dishes containing peppers, onions or tomatoes, rather than with reference to the classical brown sauce of the same name. The technique itself is shirring, baking eggs in a shallow dish over a bed of something savoury.