Home › The World's Kitchen › Shirred Eggs with Mushrooms
Shirred Eggs with Mushrooms
Finely slice twelve canned mushrooms, place in a small saucepan with two tablespoons sherry, one and half gills demi-glace one gill tomato sauce and half a saltspoon cayenne pepper, lightly mix and boil for eight minutes. Lightly butter six shirred-egg dishes, crack two fresh eggs into each, season with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, evenly divided. Set in oven three minutes, remove, divide sauce evenly over eggs and serve.
A Delmonico's-style breakfast dish that assumes a stockpot of demi-glace already sitting on the range. The measurements are old but exact; only the oven timing needs correcting.
- The unitsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of demi-glace is 3/4 cup and one gill of tomato sauce is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, which makes the cayenne about 1/8 teaspoon and the pepper 1/2 teaspoon divided among six dishes.
- Three minutes is not enoughShirred eggs need roughly 8 to 12 minutes at 350F for whites to set with yolks still soft. Three minutes will leave the whites largely liquid; the original gives no oven heat, so the timing cannot be taken at face value. Cook until the whites are opaque and firm at the edges.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Use 350F, or set the buttered dishes on the stovetop until the bottoms just begin to set and finish them in the oven.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole (the roux-thickened brown sauce) combined with brown stock and reduced, and the flavour engine of the whole dish. Good jarred demi-glace or a well-reduced beef stock works; a bouillon cube will taste thin and salty against the sherry.
- Canned mushroomsDrain them well and slice thin. They are already cooked, so the eight minutes of boiling is there to reduce the sauce and cook off the raw edge of the sherry rather than to soften the mushrooms.
- The dishes"Shirred-egg dishes" are shallow individual gratin dishes or small oval ramekins, roughly 4 to 5 inches across. Butter them generously, as the recipe directs, and warming them first helps the eggs set evenly.
- SaltingSalt the whites, not the yolks, and hold back a little: the demi-glace and tomato sauce arriving on top are both seasoned already.
- YieldSix servings, two eggs each. The sauce comes to a little over a cup, so figure about three tablespoons spooned over each dish.
Shirred eggs are the American name for a dish close to what a French kitchen calls oeufs sur le plat; the word "shirred" appears in American cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century, and its origin is usually linked to the shallow individual dish, though the etymology is not settled. This version belongs to the grand-hotel tradition: a plain egg dish is lifted by a spoonful of demi-glace, the reduced brown sauce that anchored the classical French repertoire and that a large restaurant kitchen kept going continuously. That assumption of a house sauce on hand is the real period marker here, and the reason the recipe reads as four lines rather than two pages. The sherry-and-tomato finish on mushrooms is close to the family of garnishes then labelled chasseur or Italienne.