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Shirred Eggs, Demi-Glace
Lightly butter six egg dishes. Crack two fresh eggs in each dish. Season evenly with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper. Set in oven five minutes. Remove, pour evenly one gill hot demi-glace over them and serve.
Baked eggs finished with a spoonful of brown sauce — a restaurant plate rather than a home one, and the sauce is most of the work. The original assumes you have demi-glace on hand.
- Demi-glaceClassically brown stock and espagnole sauce reduced together by half, until it coats a spoon and sets to a jelly when cold. A good jarred or frozen demi-glace, or a hard-reduced beef stock, stands in; avoid anything gravy-thickened, which will slide off the eggs rather than glaze them.
- A gillHalf a cup, about 120 ml. Split six ways that is roughly four teaspoons per dish — a band of sauce around the whites, not a pool over them. Spoon it around the edge so the yolks stay visible.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three is three-quarters of a teaspoon of white pepper across twelve eggs. With a half teaspoon of salt total, the seasoning is light because the demi-glace carries salt of its own.
- Egg dishesShallow individual gratin dishes, small cast-iron pans or wide ramekins — anything that holds two eggs in a single layer. Depth is the enemy: a deep dish steams the whites and sets the yolks before the tops colour.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the recipe uses no oven term at all. Around 350F is a reasonable modern choice for this style of dish. Five minutes will be short unless the dishes are preheated and buttered hot; expect eight to twelve minutes for whites just set and yolks still loose.
- Judging donenessPull them when the whites are opaque but the yolk still trembles — carryover heat in a hot dish keeps cooking them, and the hot sauce adds more. Yolks left runny mean eggs that have not reached 160F, worth knowing if you are cooking for anyone vulnerable.
- YieldSix servings of two eggs each, intended as a breakfast or light supper course.
Shirred eggs are the American name for what a French kitchen calls oeufs sur le plat — eggs baked and served in the same small dish. The origin of the verb is uncertain, though it is often said to come from the dish itself, a "shirr" being a shallow earthenware egg dish, and the technique belongs to the hotel and restaurant breakfast, where a dozen dishes could go into the oven at once and reach the table still sizzling. The demi-glace finish marks this as professional cooking rather than domestic: reducing brown stock and espagnole to a syrupy glaze is a day's work in a stockpot, and only a kitchen already making it for the dinner service would casually spend a gill of it on eggs. The brevity here assumes a reader who already knows what a sauce station looks like.