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Eggs with Tomato
Lightly butter the bottom of six individual shirred-egg dishes, carefully break two fresh eggs into each dish, taking care to keep the yolks intact. Equally season the eggs with half a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Cook them for one minute on the range, then place them in the oven for five minutes. Remove from the oven, pour the tomatoes, prepared as hereunder, over the eggs of each dish, evenly divided, and immediately serve.
A straightforward oeufs sur le plat with tomato sauce, written for a kitchen that had shallow eggware and a coal range. Two details need translating: the vessel and the missing sauce.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two is half a teaspoon of white pepper spread across twelve eggs. The half teaspoon of salt is likewise the total for all six dishes, not per dish.
- Shirred-egg dishesThese are shallow round gratin dishes, usually 4 to 5 inches across, that can go from burner to oven. Small cast-iron skillets or heavy ceramic ramekins work; anything deep will steam the eggs rather than set them.
- "One minute on the range"This is the hinge. Setting the dish over direct heat just long enough to opaque the bottom layer of white keeps the eggs from weeping in the oven. Do not let it go past the point where the white turns milky white or the bottoms toughen.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe assumes the oven of a coal range, presumably a hot one. A fairly hot oven, in the region of 400F, is a reasonable modern equivalent for five minutes; in a cooler oven the whites may still be loose at that point.
- The tomatoesThe "prepared as hereunder" sauce is a separate entry in the original book and is not reproduced here. Any thick, well-reduced tomato sauce answers, but it must be thick, since a watery one will flood the set whites.
- DonenessFive minutes yields a set white and a fully liquid yolk, which is the intended result. If you want the yolk firmer, go to eight or nine minutes, past which the white shrinks and squeaks.
- ButterButter the dishes more heavily than "lightly" suggests. Cooked eggs weld to unglazed ceramic and to any thin film of fat, and these are served in the dish they cooked in.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each, so six servings as a first or luncheon course. The sauce should be hot when it goes on, since it is the only thing warming the eggs after they leave the oven.
Shirred eggs are the American name for what French kitchens call oeufs sur le plat or oeufs au plat: eggs broken into a shallow buttered dish, started over heat and finished in the oven, then brought to table in the same vessel. The word "shirred" is generally traced to the dish itself rather than the cooking, and by the late nineteenth century American cookbooks used it freely for eggs baked in individual ware. That individual ware is the period marker here. One might infer that hotel and restaurant cooking of the 1900s leaned on single-portion dishes that could be plated in advance and finished to order, and that a book like this one, written from a professional dining-room perspective, gives quantities in sixes because that is how a service course was fired. The tomato garnish may belong to the same system: one well-reduced sauce, made in quantity, spooned over half a dozen variations of eggs, fish and cutlets across the menu. All of this, though, is speculation rather than documented practice.