Saturday, Fourth Week of November

The page is one day from a year-long cycle of menus, with a single recipe worked out in full. The instructions are terse in the way a hotel chef's notes are terse, and a few of the quantities and timings need translation.

• The hinge: oven timeFive minutes is unlikely to set twelve eggs, though the sausage and sauce go in hot, which helps. The book gives no oven temperature; judge by the whites turning opaque with the yolks still soft, and allow longer than the stated five minutes if needed.
• Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of tomato sauce is about 3/4 cup, roughly two tablespoons per dish. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the seasoning half a teaspoon of pepper across all six.
• SautoireA straight-sided shallow frying pan. Any 10-inch skillet does the job; the point is a wide surface so the sausage pieces brown rather than steam.
• Shirred-egg dishesSmall shallow ovenproof dishes, about 4 to 5 inches across, one per person. Individual gratin dishes or cast-iron mini skillets work; butter them even though the recipe does not say so, or the whites weld to the base.
• "Deerfoot" sausagesA branded New England breakfast sausage of the period, no longer made. Use six small fresh pork breakfast links, sliced into half-inch pieces as directed.
• Tomato sauceNot pasta sauce. Read it as a smooth cooked tomato sauce, thick enough to coat; a plain reduced passata with a little butter is the nearest quick substitute. Canned pizza sauce is too sweet and too heavily seasoned.
• Yield and servingSix servings of two eggs each, meant to arrive at the table in the dishes they were baked in. Set them on plates or folded napkins, as the dishes come out very hot and keep cooking for a minute or two.
• Soft yolksBaked this way the yolks stay liquid. That is the intended result, but it means the eggs are not fully cooked, which matters for anyone pregnant, elderly, or immune-compromised.