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Eggs in Bacon Rings
6 long slices of bacon
Salt and pepper
6 eggs
Garnish of parsley
Curl slices of bacon around the inside of muffin-cups or small ramekins. Break an egg inside each bacon-ring, season with salt and pepper and bake until set, but not hard. Remove carefully from the dish so that the egg will remain fastened to the bacon. Arrange on a platter and garnish with parsley.
A straightforward baked egg that the original leaves almost entirely to the cook's judgment — no temperature, no time. Here is what the gaps mean in practice.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable reading for a baked egg; expect the white to set through in roughly 12 to 15 minutes with the yolk still soft. Much hotter and the whites tend to toughen before the bacon has taken any colour.
- Par-cook the baconThis is the hinge. Bacon will not render properly in the time an egg needs. Lay the slices flat in a pan or a low oven for a few minutes until they are pliable and partly rendered but not crisp, then curl them into the cups. Otherwise you get a set egg wrapped in flabby fat.
- "Long slices"Means a full-length rasher that will line the side of a standard muffin cup with a slight overlap. Standard supermarket bacon is often short; use one and a half slices per cup rather than stretching one.
- Grease the tinThe instruction to remove them carefully so the egg stays fastened to the bacon assumes rendered fat has done the work. Butter or oil the cups anyway — modern non-stick is helpful but the exposed base of the cup is where the white welds itself down.
- Egg sizeA standard large egg slightly overfills a conventional muffin cup once the bacon lines it. If the whites threaten to run over, break each egg into a saucer first and leave a little of the white behind.
- Judging doneness"Set, but not hard" means the white is opaque and firm at the edge with a faint wobble at the centre; carryover cooking in the hot tin will finish it. Pull them a minute early and let them stand two minutes before lifting out.
- Yield and servingSix, one per person as part of a cooked breakfast, or two each as a light lunch dish. They collapse and weep as they cool, so they want to go straight from tin to platter to table.
Baked or shirred eggs in individual dishes were a fixture of American breakfast and luncheon cookery from the late nineteenth century, helped along by the spread of ramekins, cocottes and pressed-tin muffin pans in ordinary kitchens. Household books aimed at the middle-class housekeeper were full of such dishes, and this recipe is characteristic of the genre: cheap materials, a neat individual portion, and a presentation trick — the bacon ring standing up on the platter with parsley tucked around it — that makes two everyday ingredients look like a composed dish. The vagueness about oven heat is probably less carelessness than period convention; cooks are often said to have known their own ranges by feel, and printed temperatures are generally traced to the spread of thermostatic gas and electric ovens in the 1920s and 1930s.