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Shirred Eggs, Swiss
Heat a tablespoon melted butter in saucepan, add one light tablespoon flour, stir well while heating one minute, then pour in one and a half gills milk. Season with three saltspoons salt, saltspoon cayenne and half saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix with wooden spoon until it comes to a boil. Then add two tablespoons grated Swiss cheese, mix well and cook two minutes more. Evenly divide sauce into six shirred-egg dishes. Crack two fresh eggs into each dish. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, then set in oven three minutes. Remove, place an ounce butter in a black frying pan, toss on fire until a good brown colour, pour in one tablespoon vinegar, shuffle pan, then pour butter over the eggs evenly and serve.
A béchamel bound with Gruyère, spooned into individual dishes, topped with eggs and finished with browned butter sharpened by vinegar. Two things need fixing: the oven time, and the salt.
- Three minutes is not enoughTwelve eggs over six dishes will not set in three minutes in a moderate oven. At 375F expect 8-12 minutes, until the whites are opaque and the yolks still trembling. Pull them a shade early; the hot dishes keep cooking.
- No temperature is givenFilippini assumed a working range. Use 375F for eggs set gently in a shallow dish; higher and the whites toughen at the edges before the centres firm.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills is 3/4 cup milk. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon.
- Cut the saltAs written the sauce takes 3/4 teaspoon salt and the eggs another 1/2 teaspoon, on top of two tablespoons of aged Gruyère. Halve the salt on the eggs and taste the sauce before you divide it.
- Cayenne and nutmegA saltspoon of cayenne (1/4 teaspoon) for 3/4 cup of sauce is assertive but deliberate, and the nutmeg is standard in a cheese béchamel. Both are for the whole batch, not per dish.
- Swiss cheeseRead this as Gruyère or Emmental, grated fine. The pale sliced "Swiss" of a deli counter is milder and waxier and will not carry the sauce.
- The black frying panHeavy cast iron or black steel, used because it takes the butter to a nut-brown without scorching. The tablespoon of vinegar will spit; add it off the heat, swirl, and pour at once, since browned butter goes from brown to burnt in seconds.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each: six substantial breakfast or supper servings. The sauce quantity is modest, roughly two tablespoons per dish, which is correct here.
Shirred eggs are the American name for what French kitchens call oeufs sur le plat — eggs baked and served in the same shallow dish, so nothing has to be lifted and nothing breaks. The word "shirr" is often said to come from the small round egg dish, though the origin is uncertain, and the term has now largely dropped out of English-language cookery. Alexander Filippini, long a cook at Delmonico's in New York, worked in exactly this idiom of the national tag: a dish becomes "Swiss" because of the Gruyère in the sauce, just as another becomes "Portuguese" for its tomato, a shorthand that runs through his writing for hotel and household cooks. The finish is a small beurre noir — butter browned and cut with vinegar — a classic French treatment for eggs, brains and skate that reads as unusual today only because browned butter fell out of everyday use.