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Shirred Eggs, Fermiere
Cut an ounce of lean salt pork into dice pieces, add one medium white onion. Place in a frying pan with a teaspoon of butter and cook to a light brown, lightly stirring meanwhile. Remove the grease from the pan, then divide the pork and onions equally into six shirred-egg dishes, lightly buttered. Season all around with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, evenly divided. Place the dishes in the oven for three minutes. Remove, sprinkle a teaspoon finely chopped parsley over them and serve.
A one-line breakfast dish from the era when every household had a set of small shirred-egg dishes. The text as printed skips the step that gives the dish its name.
- The eggs are missing from the textNothing in the instructions says to break in the eggs, but shirred means exactly that: one or two eggs slid into each buttered dish over the pork and onion before baking. Add them after dividing the pork among the dishes and before the dishes go into the oven.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Shirred eggs are conventionally baked at 350-375F; hotter than that and the whites toughen at the edges before the centre sets.
- Three minutes is not enoughEven in a hot oven, eggs in cold-ish china need roughly 8-12 minutes for set whites and soft yolks. Bake until the whites are opaque and just firm at the rim, then pull them; carryover heat in the dish keeps cooking them at the table. If you want fully firm yolks, go the long end of that range.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon spread across six dishes. That is assertive but deliberate; the pepper is meant to be tasted against the salt pork.
- Salt pork and saltAn ounce of salt pork across six dishes is a seasoning, not a filling. Salt pork varies considerably in saltiness, so taste the browned dice before adding the full half teaspoon of salt.
- The onionOne medium white onion, cut fine, to match the pork dice. Cook it with the pork gently enough that it colours rather than scorches; burnt onion in a dish this plain has nowhere to hide.
- The dishesShallow individual gratin dishes, ramekins or small cast-iron pans all work. Butter them properly and set them on a sheet pan so they come out of the oven together.
- YieldSix individual dishes, one per person, intended as a breakfast or light supper course rather than a main.
Fermière is French kitchen shorthand for "farmer's wife" style, and in classic usage it signals homely vegetable and pork garnishes rather than anything from the luxury end of the larder: onion, root vegetables, a little salt pork or bacon. That is precisely what this version is, scaled down to a spoonful per dish. Shirred eggs themselves were a fixture of American hotel and club breakfast menus around 1900, served in little earthenware dishes that went from oven to table — which may well have helped keep the eggs hot, though that is inference rather than anything the record states. The book's habit of attaching a French garnish name to a simple preparation shows how a short menu could be extended almost indefinitely by varying what went under the egg.