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Shirred Eggs
Use individual fireproof dishes which come especially for this purpose, though a fireproof china saucer will answer. Butter each dish, cover with bread or cracker crumbs, sprinkle with pepper and salt slip one or two eggs into each dish. Cover with seasoned buttered crumbs and set in oven until crumbs are brown. Serve in the dishes in which eggs are cooked. BAKED EGGS OR "EGGS SUR LE PLAT," -Use individual fireproof dishes, allowing one or two eggs to each service, Butter each dish, dust with salt and pepper, break in the eggs, sprinkle again with salt and pepper and place a tiny piece of butter on each. Place in the oven until eggs are set and serve in the dishes in which they are cooked. serve.
Two related methods for baking eggs in individual dishes — one crumbed, one bare. The Butterick text gives no temperature and no time, so both hinge on watching the whites rather than the clock.
- Oven temperatureNeither version specifies heat. A moderate to fairly hot oven, 350–375F, sets the whites without toughening them; the crumbed version benefits from the upper end so the topping colours as the egg finishes.
- TimingExpect 8–12 minutes for two eggs in a shallow dish. Pull them when the whites are just opaque and the yolks still tremble — carryover heat in a hot china dish keeps cooking them at the table.
- "Fireproof china"Heat-resistant earthenware or heavy china of the sort sold for the purpose; the recipe allows a plain fireproof china saucer. Any small gratin dish, ramekin, or shallow ovenproof crock works; cast iron and stoneware hold heat longest, which argues for pulling the eggs earlier.
- Shirred versus sur le platThe difference is only the crumbs. Shirred eggs are bedded and blanketed in buttered crumbs, which insulate the egg and brown for texture; sur le plat is the egg naked on butter, dotted with more butter.
- Buttered crumbsToss dry breadcrumbs or crushed crackers with melted butter until they clump loosely, then season. Dry crumbs are more likely to scorch or dry out before the egg sets, and the recipe's "seasoned buttered crumbs" is doing real work.
- Slip, don't breakCrack each egg into a cup first and slide it in. A broken yolk in an individual dish cannot be hidden, and the eggs are served in the vessel they cooked in.
- Doneness and raw eggBaked in a shallow dish, yolks often stay loose. If serving anyone who should avoid undercooked eggs, cook until both white and yolk are firm.
- YieldOne or two eggs per person as written.
"Shirred" is the odd word here — an American term of uncertain origin, sometimes said to derive from the shallow dish (a "shirrer") the eggs were baked in rather than from any French ancestor, though the etymology is not documented. The second method carries its French name openly: œufs sur le plat, eggs on the plate, one of the standard breakfast and supper preparations of the professional repertoire, where the dish is the cooking vessel and the serving vessel both. The Butterick Cook Book, published by the pattern company for a broad middle-class readership in the early twentieth century, gives considerable space to egg dishes because eggs were the cheap, quick protein of the era's breakfast and light-supper table, and because a set of individual fireproof dishes was exactly the sort of modest, fashionable purchase such books encouraged. That the recipes specify no temperature is typical: readers were cooking on ranges without thermostats and judged the oven by hand and eye.