Escaloped Eggs
Moisten bread-crumbs with milk or meat broth; place a layer of this in a well-buttered dish; slice some hard-boiled eggs, and dip each slice in a thick-drawn butter sauce to which a well-beaten egg has been added; put a layer of them upon the crumbs, then a slight layer of minced ham, veal or chicken, then bread, etc., finishing with dry, sifted bread-crumbs; bake until well heated; or, mix equal parts minced ham and fine bread-crumbs, season with salt, pepper and melted butter, adding milk to moisten till quite soft; half fill buttered gem-pans or small patty-pans with this mixture, and break an egg carefully upon the top of each, dust with salt and pepper, sprinkle finely powdered crackers over all, set in the oven and bake eight minutes; serve immediately.
Two versions of the same idea: a layered breadcrumb-and-egg gratin, or individual baked eggs in muffin tins. The book assumes you know what a drawn butter sauce is and gives no temperature for either.
- Drawn butter sauceNot simply melted butter. In this period it is a butter sauce thickened with flour, close to a basic white sauce: roughly equal spoonfuls of butter and flour cooked together, then whisked with milk or broth until thick. "Thick-drawn" suggests stiff enough to coat the egg slices; the beaten egg stirred in adds richness and helps the layers set.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperature. "Bake until well heated" for the layered version suggests a moderate oven, around 350F, until the top crumbs brown and the centre is hot through; the individual pans probably want a hotter oven, nearer 375 to 400F, to set the whites in the eight minutes given.
- Gem-pansA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin pan; a standard 12-cup muffin tin does the job. Patty-pans are small tartlet tins. Butter them heavily and expect to serve from the pan, since the ham mixture does not unmould cleanly.
- Eight minutes is for soft yolksEight minutes is a short bake -- In a hot oven eight minutes is likely to leave the whites just set and the yolks still soft; a firmer yolk will need longer. The instruction to serve immediately suggests the dish was meant to go to table straight from the oven.
- Powdered crackersSoda crackers crushed fine, serving much the same purpose as dry breadcrumbs. Plain dry crumbs substitute well (panko is coarser); tossing them with a little melted butter helps them colour rather than scorch in a short, hot bake.
- Salt the ham lightlyCured ham in this quantity carries most of the seasoning. Season the crumb mixture cautiously and taste before adding more, particularly if you moisten with meat broth rather than milk.
- Bread-crumbsHere they should be soft crumbs from a day-old loaf, not the dry sifted kind called for on top. Moisten them until they hold together but are not soupy, or the bottom layer turns to paste.
Escaloped, or scalloped, dishes were a staple of the American middle-class table because they solved a specific problem: what to do with small quantities of cooked meat. A layered crumb gratin stretched a cup of leftover ham or Sunday chicken into a supper for four. The Dixie Cook Book, generally dated to the 1880s and usually linked to the same regional-contribution model as the Buckeye books, devotes a full section to eggs. The second variation here is an egg baked on a bed of seasoned crumbs in a gem pan, a form akin to the many "eggs in nests" and shirred-egg recipes that filled breakfast columns for the next fifty years.