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Shirred Eggs, Omer Pacha
Mix in a saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter with one and a half tablespoons flour, heat half minute, then pour in one and a half gills cream and add a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese. Season with three saltspoons salt, half saltspoon cayenne pepper and half saltspoon grated nutmeg, and mix until it comes to a boil. Lightly butter six shirred-egg dishes. Crack two fresh eggs into each dish. Evenly season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper, then evenly divide sauce over the six dishes. Sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese over eggs, set in oven five minutes. Remove and serve.
A Mornay-style sauce spooned over eggs baked in individual dishes. The measurements are period ones and the oven time is optimistic.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of cream is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon; three saltspoons is about 3/4 teaspoon.
- Go easy on the pepperThree saltspoons of pepper divided over twelve eggs is roughly 3/4 teaspoon, which reads high alongside the cayenne and nutmeg already in the sauce. Season the eggs lightly and taste the sauce first.
- Shirred-egg dishesSmall shallow ceramic or glass dishes, what a modern kitchen calls ramekins or individual gratin dishes, about 4 inches across. Two eggs to a dish means six dishes and six servings, twelve eggs in all.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was usual in cookbooks of the period. Shirred eggs of this kind are done at a hot oven, 400 to 425F.
- Five minutes is not enoughFive minutes is likely not enough -- Cold eggs under cool sauce are unlikely to set in five minutes. Expect roughly 10 to 14 minutes for firm whites and soft yolks; the blanket of sauce slows the whites. Judge by the whites losing all translucency rather than by the clock.
- Warm the sauce, or preheat the dishesThe sauce should still be hot when it goes over the eggs. If it has stood and thickened, loosen it with a spoonful of cream so it pours rather than sits in a lump, which is what causes uneven cooking.
- The rouxHalf a minute of cooking is barely enough to lose the raw taste of flour. A minute or two over low heat, without letting it colour, gives a cleaner sauce; it should stay pale.
- ServingServe in the dishes they were baked in, on plates, with toast. They carry on cooking from residual heat, so bring them out slightly under rather than over.
Naming a dish for a soldier or statesman was standard practice in the grand-hotel cooking that The International Cook Book catalogues, and Omer Pacha is generally taken to be Ömer Lütfi Pasha, the Ottoman field marshal of Croatian birth who commanded Turkish forces during the Crimean War and became a familiar name in the Western European press of the 1850s. A whole generation of restaurant garnishes acquired such labels, and the connection between the man and the plate is usually nothing more than fashion at the moment the dish was written down. What the recipe really records is the French professional habit of treating eggs as a vehicle for sauce: a small quantity of béchamel enriched with Parmesan, which is to say a Mornay, poured over eggs baked in the dish they are served from. Shirred eggs themselves were a staple of hotel breakfast and luncheon menus precisely because the individual dishes could be filled in advance and fired to order.