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Fried Eggs, Creole Sauce
Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a large black frying pan, carefully crack in twelve fresh eggs, season with half a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, fry on the range for one minute, then set in the oven for five minutes, remove, carefully glide them on a large hot dish, pour a creole sauce oven them and serve.
A shirred-egg method from the days of large households: the eggs are started on the range and finished in the oven so the whites set without the bottoms toughening. Two details matter more than the rest — pan surface and oven time.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of pepper. That is a generous amount for twelve eggs; a good pinch is closer to modern taste, especially with a seasoned tomato sauce on top.
- The "large black frying pan"Likely cast iron or blackened sheet iron, seasoned and darkened by use. A thin modern pan will set the whites too fast on the bottom before the oven stage; if you do not have iron, use a heavy ovenproof skillet or a shallow gratin dish.
- ButterOne tablespoon for twelve eggs is thin coverage in a pan wide enough to hold them all. Two to three tablespoons, well spread up the sides, is what makes the finished eggs release in one sheet as instructed.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits the five minutes called for, giving firm whites with the yolks still soft; a hotter oven will firm the yolks and colour the edges well before the time is up.
- Gliding them outThe whole point of one minute on the range is to set the underside just enough to slide free in a single piece. Loosen the edge with a thin spatula before tipping, and have the serving dish genuinely hot — cold china chills the eggs immediately.
- Pan sizeTwelve eggs in a single layer wants a 12-inch pan at minimum. Crowded eggs steam into each other and the whites will not set evenly. Two smaller pans are better than one overloaded one.
- The sauceCreole sauce in books of this period is generally tomato with onion and green pepper, sometimes with a little ham or garlic, cooked down to a spoonable thickness. Have it finished and hot before the eggs go into the oven, since the eggs will not wait.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a first course or breakfast dish, four if it is the centre of the meal.
- A typo in the original"Pour a creole sauce oven them" is a printer's slip for "over them."
Shirred or oven-finished eggs were often associated with restaurant and hotel practice in the early twentieth century, when a cook working a coal range needed a way to send out a dozen eggs at once without standing over them. This book's author is generally identified as Alexander Filippini, said to have spent decades in New York's Delmonico's kitchens, and the recipe reads like service instruction rather than home cooking: one pan, one dish, one sauce ladled at the last moment. The Creole sauce attached to it suggests how far New Orleans cooking had entered the American professional repertoire — tomato, onion and sweet pepper, cooked down and used as an all-purpose finish for eggs, fish and veal.