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Shirred Eggs Au Gratin
Lightly butter six shirred-egg dishes, crack two fresh eggs in each dish, and season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Pour a tablespoon thick cream over the eggs in each dish. Sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese over, arrange a few little bits of butter on top, set in oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
A straightforward baked-egg dish that needs two things the original leaves out: an oven temperature and a realistic time.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at 400F; preheating the dishes along with the oven helps the whites set evenly rather than slowly.
- Five minutes is optimisticTwelve eggs in six cold dishes will not set in five minutes. Expect 8-12 minutes at 400F, pulling them when the whites are just opaque and the yolks still tremble, since they continue cooking in the hot dish.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of pepper.
- Read the seasoning as a totalHalf a teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper in each of six dishes would be punishing. Treat those amounts as the quantity for the whole batch, distributed among the dishes.
- Shirred-egg dishesSmall shallow ovenproof dishes with straight sides -- individual gratin dishes or 6-ounce ramekins do the job. Depth matters: a shallow dish gives set whites and a soft yolk, a deep one steams the eggs.
- Cream"Thick cream" means heavy cream, roughly 36 percent fat or better. Lighter cream such as half-and-half is likelier to thin out in the dish.
- Getting colour on topParmesan will not brown in the time the eggs need. If you want a gratin crust, finish under the broiler for 30-60 seconds and watch it, since the yolks overcook fast at that heat.
- Yield and servingSix servings of two eggs each. Serve in the dishes on plates, with toast; the residual heat means they should reach the table within a minute or two of leaving the oven.
- Soft yolksThe yolks are meant to stay runny, which is fine for most people but not for anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised. For those eaters use pasteurized shell eggs or cook the yolks through.
"Shirred" is a distinctly American word for eggs baked in a shallow buttered dish, appearing in cookbooks through the nineteenth century and generally traced to an older sense of shirr meaning to gather or draw together, though the connection is not firmly documented; the French equivalent is oeufs sur le plat, eggs on the plate. The dish suits an era of individual serving vessels, and small china or metal egg dishes that went from oven to table were sold for the purpose; its appearance in a book called The International Cook Book fits the period's habit of dressing a plain breakfast egg in continental clothing -- here cream and Parmesan, the same treatment that put "au gratin" potatoes and macaroni on American menus of the 1900s and 1910s.