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Shirred Eggs, Lisbonnaise
Place four Spanish sweet peppers in a mortar and pound to a pate, then press through a wire sieve into a saucepan, add half teaspoon chopped tarragon and one and a half gills tomato sauce, lightly mix and let reduce on fire ten minutes. Lightly butter six shirred-egg dishes, crack two fresh eggs into each dish. Season evenly with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Then divide sauce over the six dishes. Set in oven four minutes. Remove and serve.
A Delmonico-style breakfast egg dish that depends almost entirely on the pepper-tomato sauce being made first and reduced properly. The oven timing in the original is the one thing that will not work as printed.
- Four minutes is not enoughFour minutes is likely too short in a modern home oven. The book gives no temperature; at around 375F in a cold shirred-egg dish the whites generally need something closer to 8 to 12 minutes to set with the yolks still soft. The short printed time presumably assumes a much hotter commercial oven, and possibly dishes already warm from the range.
- GillsOne and a half gills is 6 fluid ounces, or three-quarters of a cup, of tomato sauce.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of pepper spread over twelve eggs.
- Spanish sweet peppersSpanish sweet peppers here most likely means pimientos, which by this date were sold canned and jarred, already roasted and peeled; four, drained, give the pate the recipe wants. Roasted red bell peppers, skinned and seeded, substitute directly. Fresh peppers would need roasting and peeling first.
- Mortar and sieveA small food processor or blender does the pounding in seconds. Still press the puree through a fine sieve afterwards, as the recipe directs, to catch any remaining skin or fibre.
- Reducing the sauceTen minutes over moderate heat should thicken the mixture noticeably. A loose sauce will spread across the whites and slow their setting.
- Shirred-egg dishesSmall shallow ovenproof dishes, about 5 inches across, one per person. Individual gratin dishes or 6-inch cast-iron pans work; a muffin tin does not, as the eggs need to sit in a single shallow layer.
- YieldSix servings of two eggs each. If you want the yolks visible, spoon the sauce around them rather than over them.
The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), written after decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the habits of that trade: dishes named for a place, a sauce built in advance, and portions counted out in sixes for a service line. "Shirred" is the American term for eggs baked in a shallow dish, the French oeufs sur le plat; the origin of the word is uncertain, though it is often linked to the name of the shallow baking dish itself. "Lisbonnaise" signals a Portuguese treatment, which here means tomato and sweet pepper. Canned and jarred Spanish pimientos were reaching the American market by this period, which is what makes a pepper puree practical as a breakfast garnish rather than a day's work.