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Baked Eggs, Lucernoise
Boil twelve fresh eggs for eight minutes, remove, drop in cold water for one minute, take up, then shell them. Cut each into four even slices lengthwise. Mix and heat in a saucepan one tablespoon butter and one and a half tablespoons flour, add two gills hot milk, two ounces grated Swiss cheese, half an ounce fresh butter, half teaspoon salt and half saltspoon cayenne pepper. Mix well with a wooden spoon until it comes to a boil. Place half the quantity of the eggs at the bottom of a lightly buttered baking dish. Pour half of the sauce over the eggs, spreading it well; arrange the rest of the eggs over the cream sauce, then cover with the balance of the sauce. Sprinkle two tablespoons bread crumbs on top. Divide half ounce of butter in little bits over the crumbs. Set in the oven to bake for ten minutes. Remove and serve.
A hard-boiled egg gratin under a thin Swiss cheese sauce. Two things decide whether it works: the sauce must be loose enough to flow around the egg slices, and the dish goes into the oven only long enough to heat through and brown.
- Gills and saltspoonsTwo gills is one cup of hot milk. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so half a saltspoon of cayenne is a scant 1/8 teaspoon — enough to be felt, not tasted.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderately hot oven — around 400F — will heat an assembled dish through and colour the crumbs in ten minutes; if the browning lags, finish briefly under the broiler.
- The sauce is deliberately thinOne tablespoon butter and one and a half of flour to a cup of milk gives a pouring béchamel, not a paste. Anything thicker will sit on the eggs instead of spreading, and the cheese will tighten it further as it melts.
- Cheese off the boilThe recipe adds the grated cheese along with the milk and brings the whole to a boil. If you would rather not risk Swiss cheese stringing and weeping oil, boil the flour-and-milk base first and stir the cheese in off the heat.
- Swiss cheeseIn this period that means Gruyère or Emmental, and either is what to buy. Pre-shredded blends with anti-caking starch will make the sauce grainy.
- The eggsEight minutes gives yolks just set at the centre, which is what you want since they get a second heating in the oven. The cold-water minute is only to loosen the shells; peel at once rather than letting them sit.
- SlicingCut lengthwise into four with a thin wet blade or an egg slicer. Twelve eggs give 48 slices; a dish of about 8 by 10 inches will take them in the two layers the recipe describes.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, four if it is the whole of the meal. Bread and a sharp salad are the natural companions.
The name points to Lucerne, and the dish belongs to the broad Swiss and French family of œufs au gratin — hard-boiled eggs masked in a cheese-enriched béchamel and browned with crumbs. A cheese béchamel of this kind is close to what a professional kitchen would have called a Mornay. Cookbooks organised around the world's kitchens were popular in the early twentieth century, and dishes in them are often written in the vocabulary of the French-trained hotel cook and filed under a place name. This one reads less like a Lucerne household's cooking than like a chef's shorthand for "eggs, Swiss cheese, gratin."