Home › Egg Dishes and Omelets › Fried Eggs
Fried Eggs
Use strained ham or bacon fat, or olive oil, as a frying medium, never butter or lard. When fat or oil is well heated in the frying-pan break in the eggs separately, putting in only one or two at a time, so that each may be kept separate. With a spoon baste each with the fat. Half a minute should be sufficient to allow for cooking.
A basting method rather than a flipping one: hot fat spooned over the eggs sets the whites from above while the yolks stay soft. The instruction that matters is the temperature of the fat before the eggs go in.
- Why not butterThe recipe gives no reason for the ban. Butter's milk solids do scorch at the heat this method needs, though lard's smoke point is comparatively high, so flavour may be as much the point as heat. Clarified butter or ghee behaves like the recommended bacon fat if you want the dairy note.
- Strained fat"Strained" ham or bacon fat means the drippings poured through a sieve or cloth to remove browned meat particles, which would burn and speck the whites. Refrigerated bacon fat keeps for weeks and is worth saving for exactly this.
- Heat level"Well heated" here means shimmering but not smoking, roughly medium-high. Too cool and the whites spread and turn leathery; too hot and the edges go brown and lacy, which this style of egg is meant to avoid.
- Half a minuteThirty seconds is optimistic unless the fat is genuinely hot and you are basting energetically. Expect closer to a minute to a minute and a half for set whites and a fluid yolk.
- Depth of fatThe recipe assumes enough fat pooled in the pan to lift with a spoon, more than a modern greased nonstick pan holds. Tilt the pan toward you and spoon from the pool.
- Runny yolksA basted egg cooked this briefly leaves the yolk well below 160F. That is a normal choice, but use eggs you trust if serving anyone pregnant, very young, elderly, or immune-compromised.
The insistence on ham fat or olive oil reflects a household in which bacon and ham drippings were a standing kitchen resource rather than something discarded. The basting technique, spooning hot fat over the top instead of turning the egg, is what American diners would later record as "basted" on the order pad, alongside sunny-side up and over easy. Olive oil appearing as an equal alternative in a mainstream American cookbook of this period is worth noting: it was still largely an imported specialty item, and it is often said to have been stocked by druggists as well as grocers.