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Shirred Eggs, Bercy
Split six country sausages in two lengthwise, place in frying pan with a teaspoon butter, fry for two minutes on each side, place on a hot plate and keep hot. Lightly butter six shirred-egg dishes, carefully crack two fresh eggs in each dish, season with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper evenly divided. Set in oven for five minutes, remove, arrange two pieces of sausage around dish, sprinkle a teaspoon finely chopped parsley over, equally divided, and serve.
A breakfast dish from Alexander Filippini's international collection, written for a kitchen that had shirred-egg dishes on the shelf and a coal range going all morning. Two details need translating: the vessel and the oven.
- The dish itselfA shirred-egg dish is a shallow, straight-sided ovenproof dish about 4-5 inches across, one per person. A small gratin dish, a cast-iron egg pan or a wide ramekin does the same job. It must be shallow, or the whites steam rather than set.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon spread across twelve eggs. With the half teaspoon of salt, that is a modest seasoning by modern standards.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Shirred eggs are usually done in a moderate-to-hot oven, somewhere around 375F, though five minutes at that heat may well leave the whites only just set and the yolks liquid; a few minutes more will firm the yolks. Watch them rather than trust the clock, and pull them a little early since the dishes carry on cooking.
- Country sausageFresh, coarse-ground, unsmoked pork sausage in a link, not breakfast patties and not a cured or smoked sausage. Split lengthwise they are thin, but check that they are cooked through to 160F before they go on the plate, as they get no further cooking in the oven.
- Butter the dishes properlyButter to the rim, not just the base. The whites climb the sides as they set and will weld themselves to bare ceramic.
- Crack into a cup first"Carefully crack two fresh eggs in each dish" is the hinge of the recipe. A broken yolk or a fragment of shell cannot be fished out of a buttered dish without wrecking it, so break each egg into a cup and slide it in.
- ServingSix dishes, two eggs each, so six servings. They are served in the dishes they cooked in, which will be hot enough to need a plate or napkin underneath.
Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) is organised as a tour of national kitchens, and this is the French breakfast plate: oeufs Bercy, named for the Bercy quarter of eastern Paris, long the city's wine and provisions depot, whose name attached itself to a whole family of dishes built on shallots and white wine. In classical garnish terms Bercy on eggs means small pork sausages, usually with a spoonful of tomato sauce, and Filippini has pared it back to the sausage and a scatter of parsley. "Shirred" is an American word rather than a translation, and its origin is uncertain; the French would say sur le plat. Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe reflects that world, where a French name and a hotel-kitchen method were being written down for households that had neither.