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Shirred Eggs, Provencale
Finely slice four cepes (dried mushrooms). Heat a tablespoon oil in a frying pan, add the cepes, season with three saltspoons salt, one saltspoon white pepper, and nicely brown for six minutes, frequently tossing them meanwhile. Finely chop a half bean garlic with two branches parsley and add to the cepes, toss a little, then pour in a gill of tomato sauce and let cook for five minutes. Divide the sauce into six shirred-egg dishes, carefully crack two fresh eggs into each dish, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, evenly divided. Set in the oven for three minutes, remove and serve.
A straightforward œufs sur le plat with a garlicky mushroom-tomato base. Two things need attention: the dried mushrooms have to be soaked before they go near the pan, and the oven time as printed will leave you with raw whites.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is 3/4 teaspoon and one is 1/4. A gill is half a cup of tomato sauce, which divided six ways is a scant tablespoon and a half per dish — a base, not a pool.
- Cèpes must be soakedFour dried cèpes sliced and dropped into hot oil will scorch, not brown. Cover them with warm water for 20-30 minutes, squeeze them out, slice, and save the strained soaking liquid to loosen the tomato sauce. Fresh porcini or cremini, about 4 oz, work in their place.
- No oven temperature is givenA hot oven, around 425F, suits shirred eggs. A moderate 350F will work but wants noticeably longer and gives a softer, more custardy white.
- Three minutes is far too shortTwo eggs in a cold-ish dish need roughly 8-12 minutes at 425F for set whites and still-liquid yolks. Three minutes would only make sense if the dishes went into the oven already very hot, which the recipe does not say. Preheating the dishes with the sauce in them shortens the time considerably; either way, judge by the whites turning opaque rather than by the clock.
- "Shirred-egg dishes"Small individual gratin dishes or shallow ramekins, 4-5 inches across, in earthenware or metal. Anything that holds two eggs in a single layer will do; a deep ramekin steams them instead of setting them.
- Half a bean of garlic"Bean" here is a clove — half a clove for the whole pan, which is restrained for something called provençale. A full clove would not be out of place.
- Season the eggs lightlyHalf a teaspoon of salt plus two saltspoons of pepper across twelve eggs is about right in total, but it is easy to over-salt a single dish. Season each one as you fill it rather than in one pass.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each — six servings as a lunch or supper dish with bread, three if it is the centre of the meal.
"Provençale" on a menu of this era generally signals olive oil, garlic and tomato, though the combination was not so fixed as to be predictable — olives and anchovy turn up under the same name. The cèpe — Boletus edulis, the porcino of Italian kitchens — was sold dried across Europe long before fresh wild mushrooms could be shipped any distance, and dried cèpes were among the imported flavours an American cook of this period could buy in a packet. Shirred eggs were a standard part of the professional egg repertoire, and cookbooks of the period print them by the dozen with different beds beneath the eggs: spinach, ham, cheese, tomato. That is really what this recipe is — a base and a name, one entry in a long catalogue of egg dishes.