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Eggs, Wilding
Place in a small saucepan one finely chopped, seeded green pepper with a tablespoon melted butter and cook for three minutes, add a light tablespoon flour and stir well while heating for a minute. Pour in two gills cream, mix until it comes to a boil, then add a half pound fresh crab-meat flakes, with two tablespoons sherry, six sliced canned mushrooms, a teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, mix well and cook for five minutes. Transfer into a baking dish, crack twelve fresh eggs over, equally season with half a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Sprinkle over the eggs an ounce grated, cooked ham, lightly baste each yolk with a very little cream, set in brisk oven for six minutes, remove and send to the table.
A crab-and-pepper cream sauce with eggs shirred on top, in the style of the named-for-a-patron dishes that fill this book. It moves fast once the oven door opens, so have everything measured before you start.
- The hinge: the eggs go in hotThe sauce must be bubbling when the eggs are cracked over it, or the whites will not set in six minutes. Bake until the whites are opaque and firm at the edges; add two or three minutes if they are still translucent, and expect the yolks to stay soft.
- Gills and saltspoonsTwo gills is one cup of cream. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of pepper is half a teaspoon.
- Brisk ovenThe book gives no temperatures; read 'brisk' as roughly 400-425F. A cooler oven risks overcooking the sauce before the whites set.
- "A light tablespoon flour"A scant, loosely filled tablespoon. With a cup of cream this gives a sauce barely thicker than pouring cream, which is what you want under the eggs.
- Crab meatHalf a pound of fresh lump or backfin crab. Fold it in at the end and cook only long enough to heat through; the five minutes specified is the upper limit before the flakes break down and turn stringy.
- Canned mushroomsPeriod canned mushrooms were mild and already cooked. Six sliced fresh cremini, sauteed in butter first to drive off their water, are a straight substitute and better.
- Grated cooked hamAn ounce of ham, grated on a microplane or very finely minced, used as seasoning rather than as an ingredient. The recipe calls for cooked ham; a firm country ham works, and a dry-cured ham such as prosciutto will do as a substitution.
- Dish and yieldUse a wide shallow baking dish or a large cast-iron skillet so the twelve eggs sit in a single layer without crowding. Serves six as a substantial brunch course.
- Soft yolksThe eggs come out barely set. If you are cooking for anyone who should avoid undercooked egg, use pasteurized shell eggs or bake until the yolks are firm.
The International Cook Book belongs to the tradition of the American restaurant chef's compendium, in which hundreds of dishes are distinguished less by technique than by the name attached to them: eggs a la this patron, that singer, the other hotel. "Wilding" is almost certainly such a name, and the dish itself is a shirred-egg preparation of the sort that filled hotel and club breakfast menus in the first decades of the twentieth century, where eggs baked over a rich bound sauce could be assembled in quantity and finished to order in a hot oven. The particular combination here - crab, sherry, Worcestershire, green pepper - may suggest the Chesapeake and Gulf coast idiom that reached New York kitchens through canned and iced crab meat, though the connection is not documented.