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Shirred Eggs with Grated Ham
Grate two ounces lean, cooked ham and place in a bowl with a teaspoon French mustard, a teaspoon Worcestershire sauce, a half gill demi-glace, half saltspoon each cayenne pepper and grated nutmeg; mix well with a spoon, then evenly spread this into six shirred-egg dishes. Carefully crack two fresh eggs into each dish, season with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, evenly distributed, set in the oven for three minutes, remove and serve.
A Delmonico-style breakfast dish that assumes a French kitchen's stockpot and a set of individual egg dishes. Two details need translating before it works: the sauce base and the oven time.
- Half a gillA gill is 4 fl oz, so half a gill is 2 fl oz, a scant 1/4 cup. That is enough demi-glace to bind the ham into a paste, not to make a pool.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon. So a half saltspoon each of cayenne and nutmeg is 1/8 teaspoon, and two saltspoons of pepper is 1/2 teaspoon spread across twelve eggs.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole sauce combined with brown stock and reduced, a standing item in a professional kitchen of the period. A commercial demi-glace concentrate or a well-reduced brown veal or beef stock does the same job; a thin canned broth will not, since the mixture needs to be thick enough to spread.
- Shirred-egg dishesSmall shallow ovenproof dishes, roughly 4 to 5 inches across, one per person. Individual gratin dishes or wide ramekins work; a shallow dish matters more than the material, because depth turns the whites rubbery before the top sets.
- No temperature is givenThe recipe assumes the cook knew the range. Shirred eggs want a hot oven, around 400-425F, with the dishes buttered and preferably warmed first.
- Three minutes is not enoughTwo eggs in a cold dish will not set in three minutes at any sane temperature. Expect 8 to 12 minutes for whites just firm and yolks still soft; start checking at 7. The eggs continue to cook in the hot dish after they leave the oven, so pull them slightly under.
- HamLean cooked ham, grated on the coarse side of a box grater or pulsed briefly, so it distributes rather than clumps. Two ounces across six dishes is a seasoning, not a filling.
- YieldSix servings, two eggs each. Serve in the dishes, with toast, and salt the eggs before baking as written rather than after.
Shirred eggs are the American name for what French kitchens call oeufs sur le plat: eggs baked and served in the same small dish, so the whites set against hot buttered metal or earthenware while the yolks stay loose. The word shirr is of uncertain origin and is generally traced to the name of the dish itself rather than to any cooking action. This version reads as though it belongs to the restaurant tradition of Alessandro Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, whose books assume a kitchen with demi-glace already on the stove; the ham, mustard and Worcestershire under the eggs are a way of using a spoonful of that sauce to lift an otherwise plain breakfast. The combination of French sauce base with English bottled sauce is very much of its moment, when American hotel cooking drew on both without apology.