Baked Eggs
Break eight eggs into a well-buttered dish, put in pepper and salt, bits of butter, and three table-spoons cream; set in oven and bake about twenty minutes; serve very hot.
A plain shirred-egg formula from an era when the oven's heat was a guess and eggs were expected to be firm. The only real decision is how far you take them.
- Oven temperatureThe original names none. Bake at 350F; anything hotter sets the whites at the edge before the middle moves and toughens the bottom against the dish.
- The twenty minutesAt 350F, eight eggs in a single dish will be set through in about 12 to 15 minutes, with the yolks still soft. Twenty minutes will take them to a firm, faintly rubbery yolk. Pull them when the whites are just opaque and the centre still trembles; carryover heat finishes them at the table.
- The dishA shallow gratin or pie dish, buttered heavily, roughly 9 to 10 inches. Depth is the enemy here: eggs piled deep cook unevenly and weep. A single layer, yolks not overlapping, is the point.
- CreamThree tablespoons for eight eggs is a modest amount; the order of the original suggests it goes over the top rather than being stirred in, though the text does not say. Heavy cream is the safer choice; thinner dairy is more likely to loosen or curdle under sustained heat.
- Butter"Bits of butter" means small dabs dotted over the surface, not melted in. They baste the yolks as they melt and keep the tops from drying.
- SeasoningSalt scattered directly on a raw yolk leaves pale speckles on the finished egg. Season the whites and the cream, and salt the yolks at the table if at all.
- YieldEight eggs serves four generously as a breakfast or supper dish, three if it is the whole meal. Serve straight from the baking dish, and mean it about the heat: baked eggs go dull and firm within a few minutes of leaving the oven.
Baked eggs of this kind were called shirred eggs in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, a name whose origin is uncertain though it is often traced to a shallow earthenware dish said to be called a shirrer, and the technique is essentially the French oeufs sur le plat moved into a home oven. The Dixie Cook-Book gives the egg its own section. The recipe's brevity is characteristic: it assumes a cook who already knows what a well-buttered dish and a hot oven look like, and spends its words only on the proportions.