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Spinach with Baked Eggs
Form any cold, well-seasoned spinach into a neat border on rounds of buttered toast. A full tablespoonful will answer for each piece of toast. Break an egg in the center of each round, season, and sprinkle very lightly with buttered crumbs. Bake in oven until the eggs are "set."
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A one-dish way to use up yesterday's creamed or buttered spinach, and it stands or falls on how wet the spinach is. Squeeze it dry or the toast collapses under the egg.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives no temperature at all, only "bake until the eggs are set." A moderate oven, around 350F, suits it; expect roughly 10 to 14 minutes for a set white with a soft yolk, and a shallower pool of egg will set faster than a deep one.
- Drain the spinach hardCold cooked spinach holds a surprising amount of liquid. Press it in a sieve or wring it in a towel before shaping, or the border will slump and the toast turn to paste.
- Build a real wallA tablespoon per round is right, but pile it as a ring with a genuine hollow in the middle, not a flat layer. The egg needs somewhere to sit or it runs off the toast onto the pan.
- Buttered crumbsDry breadcrumbs tossed with just enough melted butter to coat, roughly a tablespoon of butter to a half cup of crumbs. Keep them off the yolk so you can judge when the egg is done.
- The toastUse a firm, close-crumbed bread cut thick and toasted dry on both sides. Soft sandwich bread has no structure once the spinach and egg juices reach it.
- Reheating leftoversCold vegetables kept more than a couple of days are not worth this treatment. The oven time here is set by the egg, not by the spinach, so start with spinach that is already safe and freshly refrigerated.
- Yield and servingTwo rounds make a light supper or breakfast portion. Bake on a buttered sheet or in a shallow gratin dish and lift with a wide spatula; they do not survive being tipped out.
Cookbooks devoted to leftovers and "rechauffes" were common in American and British publishing from the late nineteenth century through the First World War, a period in which thrift was widely urged on cooks and cold vegetables from dinner might reappear at breakfast or lunch. This dish is a household relative of eggs Florentine, the familiar pairing of spinach and egg that French practice generally dressed with a sauce; here the toast and the buttered crumbs stand in for it. Baking eggs in a nest of something else was a standard technique of the period, described as shirring or, in a flat dish, as oeufs sur le plat.