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Fried Eggs with Bacon, Country Style
Place two thin slices bacon in a small frying pan with half a teaspoon butter and fry for two minutes on each side. Carefully crack two fresh eggs in a saucer and gently slide them on top of the bacon; fry for half a minute, then place the pan in the oven for four minutes; remove, slide them on a hot dish and keep warm. Repeat the same operation for five more in a similar way and serve.
A plate of shirred eggs and bacon, cooked one portion at a time in a small pan finished in the oven. The instructions are terse in the way of professional kitchen books; a few numbers are left for the cook to supply.
- YieldProbably six servings: the operation is repeated "for five more," which most likely means five further portions, i.e. twelve eggs and twelve rashers in all, though the wording could also be read as five more eggs. Each pan holds one portion of two eggs.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe uses no oven-heat term at all. A brisk oven in the region of 400F would suit the four minutes stated; a cooler oven will need correspondingly longer.
- The panIt must be ovenproof — a small cast-iron or steel skillet, not anything with a plastic or bonded handle. A 6-inch pan is about right for two eggs.
- DonenessFour minutes in a hot oven gives set whites and a yolk still liquid. If that is not wanted, the eggs need longer, but past about seven minutes the yolks turn chalky and the whites toughen.
- The butterHalf a teaspoon alongside the bacon is presumably there to keep the pan from drying in the first minute, before the bacon gives up its own fat; with a fatty rasher it can be dropped.
- Bacon thickness"Thin slices" matters. Two minutes a side plus four in the oven will not render thick-cut bacon properly, and it will still be flabby when the eggs are done.
- Working in batchesCooking six portions in sequence means the first is cold by the last. Either hold the finished plates in a low oven at 200F, or cook the eggs in two or three larger pans at once and cut the servings apart.
This is a restaurant cook's version of the plainest breakfast in the Western world, written down in the era when eggs "au plat" — started on the stove and finished in the oven so the top sets without turning — were standard hotel practice. The name "country style" carries no fixed technical meaning; it is often taken to signal a dish served rustically, in or straight from its cooking vessel, with nothing sauced or trimmed. What dates the recipe is the assumption that the cook is producing six identical covers one pan at a time, which is how a hotel breakfast line worked. The insistence on cracking eggs into a saucer first is a general precaution rather than a datable one: a bad egg could ruin an entire pan and had to be caught on its own.