Home › The World's Kitchen › Shirred Eggs with Chicken Livers
Shirred Eggs with Chicken Livers
Remove the gall bags from six fresh, fat chicken livers, then cut them in quarter-inch pieces. Heat thoroughly a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, then drop in the livers and briskly fry for three minutes. Drain them a little, replace in pan, with two tablespoons sherry, one gill demi-glace, a half teaspoon chopped parsley, half saltspoon cayenne and two saltspoons salt. Mix well and boil for five minutes. Lightly butter six shirred-egg dishes, crack two fresh eggs into each, season with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, set eggs in oven for five minutes, remove, evenly divide sauce over eggs and serve.
A straightforward baked-egg dish whose only real difficulty is the demi-glace and the oven timing. Two points deserve attention before you start: the sauce is finished separately and spooned over, so it can be made ahead, and five minutes will not set eggs in most modern ovens.
- Oven and timingShirred eggs want a hot-ish oven, 375F, and 8 to 12 minutes rather than five, depending on the depth of the dish and how set you like the white. Judge by the white, which should be opaque throughout with no clear jelly at the edge of the yolk; the residual heat of the dish keeps cooking after it leaves the oven.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. That is a generous amount of demi-glace for twelve eggs, and it is meant to be a spoonful of sauce over each dish, not a pool.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. So the sauce takes a scant eighth teaspoon of cayenne and half a teaspoon of salt, and the eggs half a teaspoon of pepper across six dishes. Season the eggs from a pinch bowl rather than measuring; the salt draws on the white if it sits.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thickened and glossy. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace concentrate works, diluted rather less than the label suggests so it stays coating. Failing that, a well-reduced brown chicken stock will carry the dish, though it will be thinner.
- Gall bagsChicken livers sold in tubs today have been cleaned, but look them over anyway for any greenish patch or attached bile sac and cut it away with a margin. Bile is bitter enough to ruin the whole pan.
- Don't boil the livers twiceThree minutes' brisk frying already cooks pieces that size through. Boiling them another five minutes in the sauce makes them grainy. Better to lift the livers out, reduce the sherry and demi-glace for those five minutes, then return the livers with the parsley just to heat through.
- DishesShallow individual gratin dishes, small oval eggshirrers, or ramekins wide enough to hold two eggs side by side without stacking the yolks. Butter them well and warm them briefly before cracking in the eggs so the whites begin to set on contact.
- YieldSix servings of two eggs each — a substantial breakfast or a light supper course. Halving is easy; the sauce quantity scales cleanly.
Shirred eggs — eggs baked in a shallow dish, the equivalent of French œufs sur le plat — were a hotel and club staple in the period this book comes from, because they could be assembled in individual dishes, held, and finished to order. The chicken-liver garnish belongs to the same economy: livers came free with every bird a kitchen dressed, and a cook with a stockpot had demi-glace to hand, so a luxurious-looking sauce cost almost nothing but labour. Recipes of this kind, printed for domestic readers, quietly assume a household stocked like a restaurant, which is why the sauce is named in a single phrase and the sherry is not explained.