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Scalloped Eggs
Slice twelve hard boiled eggs in thin rings.
Butter well a baking-dish. Spread in a layer of grated bread crumbs, then one of the eggs, dot with bits of butter and sprinkle with pepper and salt; repeat in this order until the dish is full, having a layer of the crumbs on the top. Pour over the whole a large teacup of sweet cream or milk and brown in a moderately hot oven.
A plain scalloped dish that lives or dies on the seasoning between the layers and on not overcooking eggs that are already cooked. Everything here goes into the dish fully done, so the oven is only there to heat through and brown the top.
- The hinge: brief, hot browningThe eggs are already hard boiled; a long bake turns the whites tough and rubbery and the yolks chalky. Twenty minutes at 375-400F is enough to set the cream and colour the crumb top.
- "Moderately hot oven"Period gradings were not standardised, but this is usually read as somewhere around 375-400F, a step above what such books call a moderate oven, roughly 350F.
- A large teacupTeacup measures in period books are inconsistent, running anywhere from a gill up to a full cup. Six fluid ounces, three-quarters of a cup, is a reasonable reading of a "large" one. The liquid should moisten the crumbs, not float them.
- "Sweet cream or milk"Sweet simply means fresh rather than soured or cultured. Either single cream or whole milk works; cream browns and sets more richly.
- Grated bread crumbsThese are dry crumbs grated from a stale loaf, coarser and more absorbent than commercial fine crumbs and far coarser than panko. Dry your own in a low oven if you want the texture the recipe assumes.
- Seasoning disciplineTwelve eggs need more salt than instinct suggests, and the salt has to go on each layer rather than on top, since nothing here is stirred. A little grated nutmeg or dry mustard is period-appropriate if you want more than pepper.
- SlicingAn egg slicer or a thin blade wiped between cuts keeps the yolks from crumbling into the crumb layers. Slightly under-boiled yolks, still deep yellow rather than grey-rimmed, slice better and taste better.
- YieldTwelve eggs in a 9-inch dish feeds six to eight as a light supper or luncheon dish with bread and a salad.
Scalloped dishes -- layers of a main ingredient alternated with buttered crumbs, moistened with milk or cream and browned -- were one of the workhorse forms of nineteenth-century American cookery, applied to oysters, potatoes, tomatoes, salt cod and, as here, hard boiled eggs. The name is generally traced to cooking and serving in scallop shells, though by the time of The Butterick Cook Book (1911) it meant nothing more than the layered crumb treatment in any baking dish. Eggs in this quantity signal a household with hens or a reliable dairy delivery, and a dish like this belongs to the meatless-supper tradition: substantial, cheap, entirely made from things already in the larder, and suitable for Friday or for Lent. Butterick, a pattern company, published its cook book as part of a wider line of domestic manuals aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its dress patterns.