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Eggs and Asparagus
Cut tender asparagus into pieces half an inch long, and boil twenty minutes, then drain till dry, and put into a sauce-pan containing a cup of rich drawn butter; heat together to a boil, season with pepper and salt, and pour into a buttered dish. Break half a dozen eggs over the surface, put a bit of butter upon each, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and put in the oven until the eggs are set.
A dish of baked eggs set over asparagus in butter sauce, closer to French œufs sur le plat than to anything gratinéed. Two things in the original need rethinking: the boiling time and the sauce.
- Drawn butter is a sauce, not melted butterIn nineteenth-century American books "drawn butter" means a thin white sauce: roughly 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 1 tablespoon flour, thinned with about a cup of hot water or light stock, then enriched with more butter off the heat. A cup of plain melted butter would flood the dish.
- Twenty minutes will ruin the asparagusTwenty minutes will overcook the asparagus -- Half-inch pieces of tender asparagus are done in 2 to 4 minutes in salted water. Long boiling times for vegetables are common in books of this kind, and here the pieces get further cooking in the oven as well.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Bake at 350F. The whites will set in about 10 to 14 minutes in a shallow dish; pull the dish when the whites are opaque and the yolks still tremble, since carryover heat continues to firm them.
- "Until the eggs are set" needs judgmentIf you want runny yolks, check at 9 or 10 minutes. If you want the eggs cooked through for food-safety reasons, bake until both white and yolk are firm.
- Dish and depthUse a buttered gratin dish or pie plate wide enough that the six eggs sit in a single layer without touching, about 9 to 10 inches. Depth is the enemy here: a deep dish steams the eggs and overcooks the bottoms before the tops set.
- Quantity of asparagusNo amount is specified. Two pounds of spears, trimmed, gives enough cut asparagus to carpet a 9-inch dish under a cup of sauce.
- YieldSix eggs serve three as a light main course with bread, or six as a first course.
The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) was one of the large compiled American household volumes of its decade, assembled from contributed receipts and reprinted material rather than written by a single hand. The technique here — vegetables dressed in sauce, eggs cracked over the top and set in the oven — is a domesticated version of what French cookery calls œufs sur le plat, and it turns up in English and American books of the period under names like shirred or baked eggs. The cup of "drawn butter" is itself a period marker: that flour-thickened butter sauce was a common all-purpose dressing for boiled vegetables and fish in Anglo-American kitchens through much of the nineteenth century, and it later fell out of use.