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Shirred Eggs, Jean De Luz
Broil six thin slices ham two minutes on each side. Lightly butter six shirred-egg dishes, arrange a slice of ham in each dish, then crack two fresh eggs into each. Season all around with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, evenly divided. Set in oven three minutes. Remove, divide a gill of hot tomato sauce over them, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A straightforward oeufs sur le plat with ham and tomato sauce, written for a professional range where the dishes went into fierce heat. Two things need attention: the oven temperature is never stated, and three minutes will not set eggs.
- Shirred-egg dishesSmall shallow individual dishes of earthenware or metal, roughly 4-5 inches across, sometimes called egg gratin dishes. Wide, low ramekins or small cast-iron skillets work; anything deep and narrow steams the eggs rather than baking them.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of white pepper divided among six dishes. The half teaspoon of salt is likewise for all six, which is restrained given the ham.
- A gillHalf a cup, about 120 ml, of tomato sauce for six servings. That is a spoonful or two per dish, meant to ring or streak the whites rather than blanket them.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe only says "set in oven." Even in a hot oven the whites need roughly 8 to 12 minutes, not three.
- The timing to ignoreThree minutes leaves the whites transparent and slack. Bake until the whites are opaque and just firm at the edge with the yolks still liquid; residual heat in the dish keeps cooking them after they leave the oven, so pull them a shade early.
- The hamThe recipe calls for thin slices, and two minutes a side under a broiler is long for them. Modern thin deli ham needs no more than 30 to 60 seconds a side, just enough to warm it and take on a little colour, or it turns leathery under the eggs.
- Sauce temperatureThe recipe specifies hot sauce. Cold sauce over just-set eggs would drop the dish below serving temperature immediately.
- YieldSix servings of two eggs each, twelve eggs in all. Served in the dish it was baked in, with bread for the yolks.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) is a working chef's index of European dishes adapted for American service, which is why so many entries carry a place name as a garnish label. Jean de Luz is presumably Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the Basque fishing port on the French side of the border near Biarritz, a region associated with cured pork from the Bayonne hinterland and with tomatoes and peppers. Whether the place name functioned as a fixed shorthand for ham and tomato, in the way "florentine" meant spinach, is not something the book states. "Shirred" is an American word for what the French menu called oeufs sur le plat, eggs baked and served in the same shallow dish, and it appears in US cookbooks through the later 1800s without a settled explanation of its origin.