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Fried Eggs, Luganese
Lightly butter an enamelled shirred-egg dish, line the bottom with very thin slices Swiss cheese, crack twelve fresh eggs over the cheese, season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Pour a gill cream over, sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese on top, then set in oven five minutes. Remove and place dish on fire one minute. Remove to a table, place in a frying pan one ounce butter and two tablespoons bread crumbs, toss on fire until a nice light brown, pour over the eggs and serve.
A twelve-egg shirred dish from the Italian-speaking corner of Switzerland, built in one vessel and finished with browned butter crumbs. Almost everything hinges on not overcooking it.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The seasoning here is therefore half a teaspoon salt, half a teaspoon white pepper and a quarter teaspoon nutmeg for twelve eggs.
- GillHalf a cup of cream. Use heavy cream; the fat is what keeps the whites tender as they set.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the recipe uses no oven-heat term of any kind, so any figure is a guess. Five minutes suggests a hot oven, and twelve eggs in one dish may well need longer than that to set the whites.
- "Place dish on fire"This means the stovetop, directly under the dish, for one minute to firm the bottom layer against the melted cheese. Only do it if the dish is flameproof; modern enamelled porcelain may crack over direct flame. A cast-iron or enamelled cast-iron gratin dish handles both heats.
- The hingePull it when the whites are just opaque and the yolks still tremble. Shirred eggs continue cooking hard in a heavy hot dish, and a minute too long turns the cream and cheese into something grainy.
- Swiss cheeseGruyère or Emmental, sliced thin enough to melt into a film rather than a rope. Pre-sliced supermarket "Swiss" is milder and wetter and will not give the same nutty base.
- The crumb finishAn ounce of butter is two tablespoons. Toss the crumbs constantly and take the pan off the moment they turn light brown; butter and fine crumbs go from browned to burnt in seconds.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a first course or four to five at breakfast, with bread to mop the cream.
Luganese means "of Lugano," the city in Ticino, the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland, and the recipe reads exactly like its address: Swiss mountain cheese on the bottom, Parmesan and nutmeg on top, buttered crumbs in the Lombard manner over everything. Shirred eggs — baked in a shallow individual or communal dish, the name generally traced to the flat-bottomed "shirred-egg dish" itself — were a fixture of hotel and restaurant breakfast service in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a dish that could go from oven to table without replating suited both the kitchen and the dining room. The appeal to an American reader was less the technique, which is simple, than the promise that breakfast could be had in the accent of somewhere else.