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Baked Eggs
Mrs. L. M. Angle.
Break six or seven eggs into a buttered dish, taking care that each is whole, and does not encroach upon the others so much as to mix or disturb the yolks; sprinkle with pepper and salt, and put a bit of butter upon each. Put into an oven and bake until the whites are set.
This is far superior to fried eggs, and very nice for breakfast, served on toast or alone.
A plain shirred-egg formula that depends almost entirely on oven heat and dish choice, neither of which the original specifies.
- The hinge: gentle heatBaked eggs turn rubbery and weep if the oven is hot. Use 325-350F and pull the dish while the whites are just barely opaque; carryover heat in a heavy dish finishes them.
- The dishA shallow earthenware or enamelled gratin dish, buttered generously, holds six or seven eggs in a single layer. Depth is the enemy here: a deep casserole steams the eggs rather than setting them evenly.
- TimingExpect 10-15 minutes at 350F for set whites and soft yolks, longer if the eggs go in straight from the refrigerator; a kitchen without mechanical refrigeration would often have been starting with eggs nearer room temperature.
- Keeping the yolks wholeBreak each egg into a cup first and slide it into place. Cracking directly into the dish is how yolks break and run together, which is exactly what the recipe warns against.
- Butter"A bit of butter upon each" is unmeasured; a small knob, perhaps half a teaspoon per egg, is enough. It bastes the yolk as it melts and keeps the surface from drying to a skin.
- Doneness and safetyWhites set at roughly 145F, yolks thicken above 150F. If you want the yolks fully cooked, add a few minutes; the dish is still good, just firmer.
- YieldSix or seven eggs serve three or four at breakfast, two if served alone without toast.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1870s) was one of the earliest and most widely copied American community cookbooks, compiled from contributions by named local women and sold to raise money for charity; the attribution to Mrs. L. M. Angle is typical of the form, which treated a recipe as a piece of personal property lent to the book. The dish itself is what French cookery calls oeufs sur le plat and English-language books of the period usually called shirred eggs, a name whose origin is uncertain, though it is often said to derive from the shallow dishes the eggs were baked in. Mrs. Angle's aside that baked eggs are "far superior to fried" reflects a running theme in Victorian domestic writing, which regarded frying in hot grease as coarse and hard to digest and promoted baking and poaching as the more refined treatments for a breakfast egg.