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Shirred Eggs with Hashed Ham
Finely chop up two ounces cooked, lean ham, place in a small frying pan with a tablespoon sherry and a gill demi-glace, lightly mix, and let boil for five minutes. Remove from the fire, add half ounce good butter in small bits, mix a little. Evenly divide the hash into six shirred-egg dishes; carefully crack two fresh eggs into each dish. Season the eggs with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, equally divided. Place in the oven for three minutes, remove and serve.
A French breakfast dish in miniature: a spoonful of ham bound in meat glaze under two baked eggs. Most of the work is in the demi-glace, which the book assumes is already on the stove.
- Demi-glaceA gill is half a cup. Demi-glace is a reduced brown sauce built from veal stock and espagnole; a good jarred or frozen concentrate diluted to sauce consistency does the job. In a pinch, half a cup of well-reduced brown stock thickened lightly will carry the ham without turning the dish sweet.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of white pepper across twelve eggs. With the half teaspoon of salt, that is a firm hand on pepper by modern taste — season each dish as you go rather than measuring it all in.
- Shirred-egg dishesShallow, heatproof individual dishes: gratin dishes, small oval cocottes or ramekins about four inches across. Butter them, and set them on a sheet pan so they can all go in and come out together.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all. Bake at 375-400F; much hotter tends to set the whites unevenly before the yolks warm through.
- The three minutesThree minutes will not set two eggs unless the dishes are preheated and the ham mixture is still boiling hot. Expect 6-10 minutes at 375-400F for whites just set and yolks still loose. Pull them when the whites are barely opaque; they continue cooking in the dish.
- Reduce, then finishFive minutes of boiling is meant to tighten the sherry and glaze into a coating for the ham, not a puddle. Then the half ounce of butter goes in off the heat, in bits, so it emulsifies rather than splitting. Skip the heat-off step and the sauce breaks into oil under the eggs.
- The hamTwo ounces of lean cooked ham for six dishes is a seasoning, not a filling. Use a dry-cured or good boiled ham chopped fine; watery supermarket deli ham will thin the sauce.
- YieldSix servings of two eggs each.
Shirred eggs are the English name for oeufs sur le plat — eggs baked and served in the same small dish, a form well suited to restaurant service because it needed no plating and arrived at the table still cooking. The origin of "shirred" is uncertain; it has been linked both to a shallow dish of that name and to the sense of "shirr" meaning to gather, and the word survives in American cookbooks longer than elsewhere. The casual gill of demi-glace points to professional rather than domestic cooking: a kitchen with a stockpot running all day had reduced brown sauce to hand, and a half cup of it turned two ounces of scrap ham into a garnish worth charging for.