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Eggs, Taverne
Cut out from a stale loaf of French bread twelve thin slices, toast them to a good golden colour, then place them at the bottom of a lightly buttered baking dish, carefully crack twelve fresh eggs over, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Broil six thin slices bacon for one minute on one side only, then arrange them over the eggs cooked side downward, sprinkle a tablespoon Swiss cheese over, set in the oven for six minutes, remove and serve.
A baked-egg dish of the shirred or sur le plat family, written for a coal range and for cooks who baked eggs by eye. Two things need pinning down: the oven temperature, which the original omits entirely, and the bacon, which is deliberately left half-raw.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Six minutes implies a hot oven; something in the range of 400-425F is a reasonable modern reading. In a moderate oven the whites will still be transparent and the bacon barely warm.
- The bacon is the hingeOne minute on one side plus six in the oven is not enough to render pork fat or to cook the slices through. Cook them most of the way first, then lay them over the eggs to finish; otherwise you get flabby bacon and a pool of raw fat over the whites.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of pepper — a generous amount for twelve eggs, and correct for a dish with this little else in it.
- Egg donenessSix minutes in a hot oven will set the whites while leaving the yolks soft. If you want firm yolks, expect ten to twelve minutes and accept that the whites will toughen at the edges.
- Dish sizeTwelve eggs need a wide shallow dish — a 9x13 inch baker or two 10-inch gratin dishes. Crowded into anything deeper, the eggs pile up and the centre stays raw while the rim overcooks.
- Swiss cheeseA single tablespoon over twelve eggs is a seasoning, not a topping, and reads as thrift. Grated Gruyere or Emmental at a third to half a cup gives the browned surface a modern cook expects.
- The breadStale French bread toasted golden is structural: it absorbs the loosest white and keeps the bottom from weeping. Fresh bread turns to paste. Dry the slices in the oven first if your loaf is soft.
- YieldTwelve eggs, twelve toasts and six rashers: six servings of two eggs each.
Taverne here means tavern-style -- plain, assembled fast from bread, eggs, bacon and a scrap of cheese. The dish belongs to the large family of European baked eggs, oeufs sur le plat, in which eggs are cracked whole into a buttered dish over some foundation of bread, ham, cheese or sauce and set in the oven rather than fried; French professional cookery of the period listed dozens of such garnishes under that heading.