Baked Eggs

Ingredients

• an egg
• butter previously browned

Method

1. 1

   Bake the eggs in browned butter.

2. 2

   They should be removed from the oven while the yolks are still soft to maintain the dish's character.

Nutrition per serving

As published

This recipe was extracted from The spirit of cookery (1895) by Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Thudichum, page 372. The excerpt below is the record exactly as published.

an egg-cooker, which ensures the cooking of eggs to the desired point. Eggs must be assumed to be at the average temperature of the air. Now, if such an egg be placed in boiling water, the effect produced upon it will depend upon the quantity of the tcater and the sioiftness of the qjroduction of heat underneath the vessel in which it is boiling. As these conditions will be constantly varying, and, more particularly, the eggs will be varying in number, no mathematical rules for boiling eggs can be laid down such as could be observed practically in a rO.-lCfriXG AXD frying of eggs 591 kitchen, however accurately an egg, or any number of eggs, may be boiled by a strict application of these mathematical rules in a laboratory or on a breakfast-table. Hence it follows that the boiling of eggs in kitchens will mostly be left to the instinctive feeling of cooks, and that the practice which they have once acquired can never be modified, because it is inaccessible to argument based upon physical data, and therefore boiled eggs for breakfast will always, within certain limits, be a result of fortuity. Poached eggs are eggs boiled after the removal of the shell. The cook who wishes to display her skill in poaching, says Kitchiner, must endeavour to procure eggs that have been laid a couple of days. Those that are quite new-laid are so milky that, take all the care you can, your cooking of them will seldom procure you the praise of being a prime poacher ; on the other hand, you must have fresh eggs, or it is equally impossible. The beauty of the poached egg is for the yolk to be seen blushing through the white, which should only be just sufficiently hardened to form a trans- parent veil for the egg. To poach eggs, have a stewpan half filled with clear boiling water on the fire ; add some salt and a little vinegar ; break an egg into a cup, remove the stewpan from the fire, and gently slip the egg into the water ; let it stand till the white be set, then put the pan on the fire, and as soon as the water boils take out the egg with a slice or straining ladle ; trim off the ragged edges of the white with a pair of scissors, and place it on toast or any other suitable basis. Or break ea.ch egg into a separate dariole mould, and slip one after the other into the stewpan containing boiling water mixed with a tablespoonful of vinegar and some salt ; let them boil for two minutes, and withdraw them in the order in which you entered them, or simultaneously by means of a wire basket. The bread to receive the poached egg should be a little larger than the egg, and about a quarter of an inch thick ; it 592 THE SPIRIl OF COOKERY should be toasted on one side only, with or without butter, only just of a yellow colour, never brown, which would make it bitter. You may flavour the toast, if desired, very cautiously with a few drops of vinegar, or some anchovy essence, or anchovy butter, or fillets of anchovies. Poached eggs have many opportunities in cookery ; they are canonical as accompaniments to fried streaky bacon, or ham, for breakfast ; they are suitable for a small snatch-meal -which a person may have to get at short notice, and agreeable garnishes to several entremets, such as boiled spinach with butter. Fried eggs are, like their boiled brethren, a dish easily made and easily spoiled ; in -particular, to make them a little coloured while preventing them from becoming hard and tough is difficult. They are generally fried in a flat pan, which causes them to spread excessively ; but there are special pans now obtainable which have a little well or excavation for each egg, so that the whites are kept together, and prevented from thinning out and frizzing up. In this apparatus eggs can also easily be baked in the oven. Fried eggs may be eaten with a little browned butter, and are much improved in taste by the addition, as mere zests, of acidulated gravies. Some discountenance the hroioning of the fried eggs, and we are inclined to endorse that view, * (Ru/s pochus were nuide by the ‘ Cuisinier Imperial de 1808 ’ and the ‘ Cuisinier Royal de 1839,' one of many opportunities', ‘pour se donner par ecrit un faux air de magnificence.’ To make a little sauce for fifteen poached eggs you were to have ready cooked ‘green,’ or a little under- done, twelve roaal ducks ; you were to score them down to the bone, collect the juice, and pour it over the eggs. This reminds of Brillat-Savarin’s Varietes, ii., ‘ Phys. d. Goilt,’ p. 317, containing an anecdote entitled ‘ Les (Eufs au Jus.’ While on a journey, trying to obtain a breakfast at an inn, he got the gravy out of a leg of mutton, which was being roasted for other travellers, by ‘ giving to the forbidden leg a dozen deep stabs with a travelling knife,’ and, getting the cook to steal the gravy, had liis poached eggs flavoured with it. ‘ While we were regaling ourselves we Laughed like fools, because in substance we devoured the leg of mutton, leaving to our friends the English the trouble of chewing the residue.’ BAKED EGGS, OMEI.ETTES 593 for the browning does not, as in the case of meat, produce any flavour. Break the eggs into the hot fat ; do not turn them, but while they are frying keep pouring some of the hot fat over them with a spoon. When the yolk just begins to look white, which it will in about two minutes after the beginning of the frying, they are sufficiently cooked ; the white must not lose its transparency on the convex upper side, but the yolk be seen blushing through it. A well-fried egg should look as white and delicate as a poached one. French cooks put some little sj^ring onions shredded, called by them petits appetits, into the fat in which the eggs are fried, and later on parsley and tarragon vinegar. It is said not to be advisable to fry eggs in oil; but a typical French dish. Fried Eggs a la Provencale, is done in oil only. Baked eggs are done in butter previously browned

Cook this with the app: pantry check, scaling, and the assistant.