Home › The World's Kitchen › Shirred Eggs, San Sebastian
Shirred Eggs, San Sebastian
Cut in very small squares one large green pepper, place in a small saucepan with three sound, chopped, small shallots, a teaspoon melted butter, and fry for three minutes. Add one Spanish sweet pepper cut same shape, and one and a half gills tomato sauce, lightly mix, cook for five minutes. Evenly divide the sauce into six shirred-egg dishes and carefully crack two fresh eggs into each dish. Finely chop one ounce cooked lean ham and sprinkle it over the six dishes of eggs, set in oven four minutes, remove and serve.
A Basque-style pepper base under baked eggs, written for a coal range and six individual dishes. Almost everything translates directly; the timing is the part that needs attention.
- The four minutes is not enoughFour minutes is likely short in a modern home oven -- shirred eggs in cold-ish gratin dishes often need something closer to 8-12 minutes at around 400F before the whites set and the yolks stay soft, though a very hot oven and hot sauce underneath will shorten that. Judge by the whites, which should be opaque with no clear liquid, rather than by the clock.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills is 3/4 cup of tomato sauce, about 6 fl oz. Divided among six dishes that is about 2 tablespoons apiece, enough to line the bottom and no more.
- Shirred-egg dishesSmall shallow ovenproof dishes, 4 to 5 inches across, each holding two eggs. Individual gratin dishes, cazuelitas or a wide ramekin all work; a shallow dish matters more than the material, since deep sides steam the eggs instead of setting them.
- Spanish sweet pepperThis most likely means pimiento, sold jarred or canned and already cooked and peeled, which would explain why it is added late and needs only warming. If you use a fresh red bell pepper instead, give it frying time alongside the green one.
- Warm the sauce, warm the dishesSpooning the hot pepper mixture into cold dishes drops the temperature and lengthens the bake. Divide the sauce while it is still hot and get the eggs in immediately.
- The hamOne ounce of cooked lean ham across twelve eggs is a seasoning, not a filling. A firm boiled ham chopped fine is right; scatter it on before the dishes go in the oven, as the recipe directs.
- SaltThe original specifies none. Season the pepper base as it cooks and give the eggs a little salt and pepper as they go in.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each, twelve eggs in all.
San Sebastián sits on the Basque coast, and the pepper-and-tomato base here is close to the piperade found on both sides of the western Pyrenees: green peppers softened in fat, sweet red peppers added late, tomato to bind. Turn-of-the-century American cookbooks that organised themselves by nation often attached a city name to a dish as shorthand for a regional flavour rather than as a claim about a particular local recipe, and the Spanish sweet pepper may be doing that work here. Canned pimientos from Spain were a familiar import in American groceries by this period, which is why a cook could reach for one without comment. Shirring itself, baking eggs in a shallow individual dish, was common hotel and restaurant practice, an efficient way to send out eggs to order in something that arrived at the table still hot.