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Baked Ham and Eggs
Butter a shallow baking-dish and sprinkle two tablespoonfuls of well-buttered soft bread-crumbs on the bottom. Add one cup of cooked ham chopped and one-quarter cup of hot milk. Break on top the number of eggs desired. Season and sprinkle with few fine white crumbs, well buttered. Bake until the eggs are sufficiently cooked. Garnish with a little finely chopped water-cress, if at hand, and serve in the bakingdish. a
A shirred-egg dish built on the tag end of a ham, typical of the leftover cookery this book exists to promote. The only real variable is oven time.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 350F; the eggs set gently and the crumb topping browns without scorching.
- How long "sufficiently cooked" isFor whites just set and yolks still soft, count on 12 to 15 minutes in a shallow dish. Pull it when the whites look barely firm and slightly translucent at the yolk edge, since carryover heat in the hot dish keeps cooking them at the table.
- The hingeWarm the milk and have the ham at room temperature or warmer. Cold ingredients under the eggs mean the whites overcook by the time the middle of the dish comes up to heat.
- Dish sizeA shallow gratin dish or pie plate of about 8 inches holds a cup of ham and four eggs in a single layer. Piling the eggs deep, or crowding them, defeats the point.
- Soft crumbs vs. fine white crumbsPeriod cookery books commonly distinguish soft crumbs from finer, drier ones, though this recipe does not spell the difference out. The bottom layer reads as fresh crumb from the inside of a loaf; the topping is described only as finer. Butter both.
- SeasoningSalt lightly or not at all. Cured ham carries plenty; pepper and a scrape of nutmeg do more for it.
- YieldOne egg per person is a light breakfast, two makes a supper dish. The recipe leaves the number of eggs to the cook and states no yield; at four eggs it would serve two.
Cookbooks devoted entirely to left-overs were a small publishing genre in America between roughly the 1890s and the First World War, when the domestic-science movement recast thrift as a technical skill rather than a shame. Baked eggs of this kind were usually called shirred or oeufs sur le plat, cooked and served in the same dish, and the buttered crumbs beneath serve a practical purpose: they insulate the eggs from the hot floor of the dish and soak up the ham fat and milk. Water-cress, offered here only "if at hand," was a cheap and widely available green in the period, gathered or market-bought and used the way parsley is now.