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Shirred Eggs, Epicurienne
Remove the skin and fat from a fresh veal kidney, then cut it in quarter-inch-square pieces. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in frying pan, add the kidney and briskly fry for five minutes, sprinkle a teaspoon flour over them, stir well. Pour in a half tablespoon sherry, gill milk and half gill cream, season with three saltspoons salt and saltspoon cayenne pepper, mix well and let boil for five minutes. Remove, then evenly divide it in six shirred-egg dishes, carefully crack two fresh eggs in each dish evenly season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, set them in the oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
A veal-kidney ragout spooned into individual dishes and finished with eggs baked on top. Two things the original leaves out: the oven temperature and the fact that kidney needs preparation before it hits the pan.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of salt is 3/4 teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, making the sauce 1/2 cup milk plus 1/4 cup cream.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; a moderately hot oven, around 375-400F, suits shirred eggs. Too low and the whites take a long time to set; too high and the edges toughen before the centres are done.
- Five minutes for the eggs is optimisticTwo eggs in a cold dish will usually need longer than five minutes to set the whites, perhaps 8-12. Pull them when the whites are just opaque; carryover heat in the ceramic keeps cooking them at the table.
- Sourcing veal kidneyOrder it from a butcher; supermarkets rarely stock it. Lamb kidney is the closest easy substitute, beef kidney the least suitable — it is much stronger and tougher.
- Prepare the kidney firstBeyond removing skin and the hard white core of fat, many cooks soak the diced kidney in cold milk or lightly salted water for 30 minutes and pat it dry. Veal kidney is milder than beef or pork, but the soak insures against any ammoniac edge reaching the cream sauce.
- Do not overcook the diceQuarter-inch pieces are cooked through in well under the five minutes of frying plus five minutes of boiling the recipe calls for, and they turn granular. Sear them a minute or two, build the sauce, then return the kidney only long enough to heat through.
- ThickeningA teaspoon of flour to 3/4 cup of dairy gives a very loose sauce, which is what you want — it should nap the bottom of the dish, not hold the eggs up. Simmer briefly to lose the raw flour taste.
- YieldSix dishes with two eggs each: six servings as a lunch or supper dish, with toast. Use shallow ceramic or cast-iron gratin dishes about 5 inches across.
"Shirred" eggs are often said to take their name from the shirrer, a small shallow dish in which eggs were baked and brought to table, though the origin of "shirr" in this sense is uncertain — the fabric sense, to gather, has also been proposed — and the word is an Americanism usually dated, loosely, to somewhere around the middle of the nineteenth century; French cookbooks call the same thing oeufs sur le plat. Dressing them épicurienne was one of dozens of garnish names that let a hotel kitchen turn one basic preparation into a long breakfast and luncheon card — the eggs stay the same, the bed beneath them changes. That the bed here is veal kidney in a sherried cream sauce says a good deal about the period: offal was cheap, cooks knew how to handle it, and a kidney ragout was an ordinary rather than an adventurous thing to find under a breakfast egg in a hotel dining room.