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Eggs, Brown
Cut twelve cooked shrimps into small pieces and place them in a frying pan with a tablespoon sherry, one and a half gills cream, two saltspoons salt and one saltspoon each cayenne pepper and grated nutmeg; lightly mix, and let boil for five minutes. Evenly divide this preparation into six egg-cocotte dishes, carefully crack two fresh eggs into each dish and season equally with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Pour a tablespoon tomato sauce over the eggs in each dish, place on a tin, set in the oven for six minutes, remove and serve.
A shrimp-and-cream base baked under eggs in individual dishes, from a book that measures in gills and saltspoons and never names an oven temperature. A few conversions and one timing correction make it workable.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of cream is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon; two saltspoons is half a teaspoon.
- Read the seasoning as a totalHalf a teaspoon of salt and two saltspoons of white pepper per dish would be brutal across six dishes. The phrasing "season equally" most likely means dividing that amount among the six, which works out to a small pinch of salt and a smaller one of pepper per dish.
- Egg-cocotte dishesThese are small straight-sided porcelain ramekins of about 4 oz. Any 4-6 oz ovenproof dish works, but two eggs need a wide enough base that they sit in one layer rather than piling up.
- The oven temperatureNone is given. Baked eggs of this type want a moderately hot oven, 375-400F, and the "tin" the dishes sit on is simply a baking sheet; a shallow pan of hot water underneath gives gentler, more even setting.
- Six minutes is optimisticTwo eggs over a creamed base in a ceramic dish will usually need longer than six minutes at 375F for the whites to set; because the shrimp mixture goes in straight from the pan and hot, as written, the time will be at the shorter end. Pull them when the whites are just opaque and the yolks still tremble, as carryover heat in the ceramic keeps cooking them.
- Boiling the cream five minutesThat is long enough to reduce the cream noticeably, which is the point, but cooked shrimp will toughen. Simmer the cream down first and stir the shrimp in at the end.
- Tomato sauceIn 1906 this means a cooked, reduced, seasoned sauce of the escoffier kind, not passata or ketchup. A thick tomato coulis or a spoonful of good marinara reduced until it mounds on the spoon is closer than anything out of a bottle.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each, so six servings as a first course or lunch. Serve immediately with toast; baked eggs go hard within minutes of leaving the oven.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, arranged The International Cook Book alphabetically by dish name, which is why an entry reads "Eggs, Brown" rather than "Brown Eggs." A great many of his recipes carry what looks like a surname, though the book gives no clue what or who "Brown" was here, or whether a person was meant at all. The dish itself belongs to the large family of oeufs en cocotte that French-trained American chefs relied on for breakfast and light supper menus: a savory base in a small porcelain dish, eggs broken over it, a brief pass through the oven. Shrimp in cream with cayenne and nutmeg was a standard restaurant flavoring of the period.