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Baked Eggs with Cheese
Follow directions for baked eggs, sprinkling slices of toast with cheese before eggs are dropped onto them, or slip eggs into buttered egg shirrers. Cover with white sauce, sprinkle with grated cheese and buttered crumbs. Bake until eggs are set.
A sketch rather than a recipe: it assumes you have the book's baked-egg method and a standing white sauce in hand. The points below fill in what the original leaves unsaid.
- Egg shirrersA shirrer is a small shallow individual dish, usually earthenware or china, holding one or two eggs. Ramekins, small gratin dishes or a shallow muffin-top pan stand in exactly.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits baked or shirred eggs: much hotter and the whites toughen at the edges before the yolks warm through.
- TimingRoughly twelve to fifteen minutes in a moderate oven for whites just set and yolks still soft; a few minutes more if you want the yolks firm. The eggs carry on cooking in the hot dish after they leave the oven, so pull them a shade under.
- White sauceA thin-to-medium white sauce: 1 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp flour, 1 cup milk, seasoned. Keep it on the loose side, as it thickens under the oven's heat and over the crumbs.
- The cheeseThe recipe just says cheese; in an American book of this date that most likely meant a firm yellow cheddar-type cheese, grated. Aged cheddar, Gruyere or a mix works; avoid anything very wet or very oily, which will break under the sauce.
- Buttered crumbsDry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly 2 tbsp butter to 1/2 cup crumbs. They exist to brown; unbuttered crumbs simply go dusty and pale.
- Toast versionIf you use the toast base rather than shirrers, toast it well and hollow a slight depression for the egg. Soft toast under white sauce collapses into pap.
- YieldFigure two eggs per person as a lunch or supper dish, with about 1/4 cup sauce and a tablespoon of cheese for each egg.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given free to policyholders, part of a broad early-twentieth-century campaign in which insurers took up public health and domestic education as a way of keeping their customers alive. That explains the shape of this book: short, plain, budget-minded entries organized around nutrition rather than pleasure. Its attention to meat substitutes, with eggs and cheese doing the work of a chop, reflects both the era's new grasp of protein and the practical pressure of food costs, sharpened during and after the First World War when meatless days were promoted as patriotic. Shirred eggs themselves are older -- the word is English and of obscure origin, though the derivation from a dish that held the egg flat while it baked is often repeated, as tradition rather than established fact -- and were a fixture of American breakfast and luncheon cookery long before this book condensed them into three sentences.