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Eggs, Crimmins
Finely chop a sound, green pepper and place it in a small saucepan with a tablespoon butter and cook for five minutes, or until it attains a nice light brown; pour in two gills of tomato sauce, lightly mix; then add six finely minced mushrooms, six shelled, fresh shrimps cut into small pieces, one truffle very finely minced and half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley; lightly mix and let gently cook for ten minutes. Pour the preparation into a large baking dish. Carefully crack twelve fresh eggs over the preparation; mix a half teaspoon salt with a half teaspoon white pepper and two saltspoons curry powder and evenly season the eggs with it. Divide two tablespoons cream on top of the eggs. Set in the oven to bake for six minutes. Remove, place the dish on another cold one and serve.
A shirred-egg dish built on a quick shrimp and tomato ragout. The original assumes you know your own oven, so the numbers below fill in what Filippini left out.
- GillsTwo gills is one cup. Use a thick tomato sauce rather than a thin passata, or the eggs will slide and poach instead of setting.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of curry powder is roughly half a teaspoon for twelve eggs — a background warmth, not a curry.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Six minutes implies a hot oven -- somewhere around 425-450F is a reasonable modern reading -- with the sauce already hot when the eggs go in. In a moderate oven the whites will need considerably longer than the stated six minutes.
- The hingeThe sauce must be hot when you crack the eggs onto it. Heat from below sets the bottoms of the whites while the tops stay glossy; a cold base gives you raw albumen under cooked yolks.
- DonenessSix minutes leaves the yolks liquid and the whites barely set — that is the intention. Pull the dish when the whites have just turned opaque, as they firm further off the heat. Anyone avoiding soft yolks should bake until fully set and accept the harder yolk.
- Shrimp"Six shelled, fresh shrimps" means six whole small shrimp, not six pounds. Cut them small; ten minutes in the sauce is enough, and any longer turns them tight.
- TruffleOptional in practice. A fresh black truffle is a considerable expense for one dish; a teaspoon of truffle paste or a few rehydrated dried mushrooms with their soaking liquid gives comparable depth. Truffle oil is a different, cruder flavour.
- The cold dishThe recipe ends by setting the hot baking dish on a cold one before serving, which slows the carry-over cooking. No reason is given in the text. Worth doing.
- YieldTwelve eggs in one wide dish serves six as a lunch or supper course, with bread for the sauce. Use the widest shallow dish you have so the eggs sit in a single layer.
Filippini's International Cook Book (usually dated to around 1911, though the book's publication history is muddled) is full of dishes carrying the surnames of New York figures — clients, hotel patrons and public men from his years at Delmonico's — and "Eggs, Crimmins" is generally taken to be one of them rather than a dish with any independent tradition; the book itself offers no explanation of the name. The dish is a shirred egg, or oeufs sur le plat, a form that let a restaurant kitchen turn out a hot egg course to order in minutes over a garnish prepared in advance. The particular garnish here — green pepper, tomato, shrimp, curry powder — reads as distinctly American-continental for its date, the sort of mild curry seasoning that had been absorbed into hotel cooking through Anglo-Indian channels and by 1911 needed no comment at all.