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Shirred Eggs with Cream
Lightly butter six shirred-egg dishes, pour one and a half tablespoons sweet cream into each dish. Carefully crack two fresh eggs into each. Evenly season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, set in oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
A six-portion breakfast dish that depends entirely on oven heat and on stopping before the yolks set. The original gives no temperature, so that is the first thing to fix.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives no number. A moderate oven, around 375F, suits the dish; much below 350F the whites are slow to set and stay weeping, and much above 425F the cream can scorch at the edge before the whites are done.
- Five minutes is optimisticTwo eggs in a cold ceramic dish will likely need 8 to 12 minutes at 375F for set whites and liquid yolks. The recipe gives no indication that the dishes were preheated or that the eggs were started over direct heat.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of white pepper for the whole batch of six dishes. The half teaspoon of salt is likewise for all six, not each.
- Shirred-egg dishesSmall shallow round dishes with low sides, about 4 to 5 inches across, holding two eggs in one layer. Individual gratin dishes, cast-iron egg pans or 6-ounce ramekins all work; anything deep will steam the eggs rather than bake them.
- Sweet creamSweet cream means fresh, unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour cream that was a normal larder item. Heavy cream at 36 percent or better is right; half-and-half thins out and separates.
- Season after, not beforeSalt sprinkled on raw yolk leaves pale pocks where it sits. Season the whites as they go in, or salt the finished dishes at the table.
- Doneness and carryoverPull them when the whites are just opaque and the yolk still trembles. The hot dish keeps cooking on the way to the table, and the recipe's 'remove and serve' leaves no room for holding.
- YieldSix servings, twelve eggs, served in the dishes they were baked in on a plate or folded napkin so no one grabs the rim.
Shirred eggs are the American name for what French kitchens call oeufs sur le plat — eggs cooked and served in the same small dish, so that the cream, butter and seasoning stay with them. The word shirr appears in American cookbooks through the second half of the nineteenth century; the origin of the verb is unknown, and the etymology has never been settled. Its place in a volume of hotel and restaurant cookery is easy enough to imagine: the eggs need no plating, and travel from oven to guest in the vessel they were cooked in.