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Baked Eggs
Toast circular pieces of bread from which a little of the centers have been removed. Place pieces on a buttered dish. Break an egg and drop contents in the center of bread. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dot with butter, pour on a little milk or cream and bake in a moderate oven until eggs are cooked.
A one-pan egg-in-toast that bakes rather than fries. The whole thing hinges on pulling it out while the yolks are still soft, since the residual heat in the dish keeps cooking them.
- Moderate ovenRead that as 350F. At much above 375F the whites toughen and brown at the edges before the yolk has warmed through.
- TimingThe original gives none. Figure 12 to 15 minutes for a set white and a runny yolk, 18 to 20 for firm. Check at 10 minutes; eggs go from soft to chalky in about two.
- The holeThe recipe says only that "a little of the centers" be removed; cut it with a small glass or a round cutter, leaving a generous rim. Too wide a hole and the egg runs out under the toast rather than sitting in it.
- Toast first, and mean itUntoasted bread absorbs the milk and collapses into pudding. Toast until dry and stiff on both sides; day-old bread holds up better than fresh.
- The milk or creamA tablespoon per egg is plenty. It is there to keep the white tender, not to poach the egg, and more than that will pool and curdle.
- Buttered dishA shallow gratin dish or a rimmed sheet pan both work. Butter generously or the toast welds itself down.
- YieldOne round per person as a light supper dish, two if it is the whole meal. Everything scales directly.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given away to policyholders — one of the many free cookbooks that insurers, gas companies and flour millers distributed in the first decades of the twentieth century as both goodwill and public-health instruction. Books of this kind reflected the nutritional thinking of the era: eggs, cheese and legumes were promoted as cheap sources of protein, and a household that could not afford a chop daily was told, in effect, that it did not need one. Baked eggs on toast rounds appear under various names in period books, and the format survives largely unchanged in the modern skillet version, where frying is now the usual method for a single serving.