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Baked Eggs and Bacon
Cut very thin slices of bacon, allowing two slices for each egg to be used. Fry the meat very crisp and brown, and arrange the slices in groups of two on a large, flat plate. Break one egg over each group, bake it in a hot oven, and Individual dishes for baking eggs can now be procured at small cost, and the serving is more effective when they are used.
A plain set of shirred eggs, printed in an era when a flat ovenproof plate was standard equipment. The text as printed breaks off mid-sentence, so the finishing instruction has to be supplied from practice.
- The hinge: heat the dish, not just the ovenThe bacon fat and the plate should still be hot when the egg goes on, so the white begins to set from below immediately. A cold plate gives a flabby, weeping white by the time the top has cooked.
- "A hot oven" is too hot herePeriod guides gloss a hot or quick oven loosely, somewhere around 400-450F, which will toughen the white before the yolk warms through. Around 375F for 10-14 minutes gives set whites and a liquid yolk; take them out while the white still looks a shade underdone, as it carries on cooking on the hot dish.
- The plate must be ovenproofThe recipe specifies only "a large, flat plate," which here has to be one that will take oven heat. Modern china and any plate with metallic trim should not be used; a shallow gratin dish or a cast-iron skillet does the same job.
- Individual dishesThe "individual dishes for baking eggs" the recipe says can now be had cheaply are what a modern cook calls cocottes, shirred-egg dishes or ramekins. A 4-inch ramekin takes one egg with its two bacon slices coiled around the inside.
- Bacon thicknessThe recipe calls for very thin slices fried very crisp, and assumes they will be rigid. Standard modern rashers are thicker and will not crisp in the same time; cook them until brown and rigid, then drain most of the fat but leave a film in the dish.
- The missing endingThe sentence cuts off before the seasoning and serving. Season the egg with salt and pepper after baking rather than before, since salt on a raw yolk leaves pale speckles, and serve straight from the dish with toast.
- YieldReckon one or two eggs per person for breakfast, with two slices of bacon for each egg as the recipe directs. The whole thing goes cold quickly on a flat plate, so bake it only when the table is ready.
Baking eggs on a flat dish is the French oeufs sur le plat, known in English-language cookbooks as shirred eggs; the origin of "shirr" in this culinary sense is uncertain. Butterick, better known for dress patterns than dinners, published its cook book for a middle-class household that was buying its way into new table fashions, and the closing note here reads as a shopping tip: on the recipe's own evidence the small egg dishes could by then be had at small cost, and serving each person an individual portion in its own vessel suits the book's general concern with table style. The pairing of eggs with fried bacon as a breakfast dish is much older than the recipe and needs no explaining.