Baked Eggs (the Williams family cook's)

History

This recipe comes from "Dishes & Beverages of the Old South" (1913), Martha McCulloch-Williams's mixture of cookbook and plantation reminiscence. It is a thrift dish, and the book says so plainly: the eggs are broken at the small ends, the whites drained away, the shells broken down into "deepish cups, each with a yolk at bottom," seasoned, dotted with butter, set upright close together in a pan and baked twenty minutes. The author's note explains why it existed — "This Mammy gave us to keep from wasting yolks when wedding or Christmas cake demanded many whites for frosting." It is a cook's solution to a specific waste problem in a kitchen that baked at scale.

In the 1913 book the recipe is headed "Baked Eggs" and credited in that sentence to "Mammy" — the author's word, and not a name. McCulloch-Williams names her white contributors throughout the volume, among them Betsy Vaughn, Leslie Fox, Aunt Polly Rives and Dorothy Dix. The Black woman who ran her family's kitchen and taught her to cook appears only by a household role-title, and the book never records her name. Food historians have documented this as a convention of early-twentieth-century Southern cookbooks, in which Black cooks were credited as generic figures rather than named individuals. Foodymology titles the recipe for the cook rather than for that word, and keeps the book's original wording here in the record.

McCulloch-Williams was a white writer born near Clarksville, Tennessee, who grew up on a plantation in the years before the Civil War. Her book's affection for that world is undisguised and unreckoned-with; its dedication reads, "So here's to our Mammys — God bless them! God rest them! This imperfect chronicle of the nurture wherewith they fed us is inscribed with love to their memory," and its opening argues that "it was through being the best fed people in the world, we of the South Country were able to put up the best fight in history, and after the ravages and ruin of civil war, come again to our own." Readers should know that framing is in the source. The cooking recorded here is largely the work of the enslaved and formerly enslaved women the book declines to name.

Ingredients

• fresh eggs
• a bit butter
• salt
• pepper

Instructions

1. Break fresh eggs carefully at the small ends and drain away the whites. Break down the shells to form deepish cups, each with a yolk at the bottom. Sprinkle the yolks lightly with salt and pepper. Add a bit of butter to each cup. Set the shells upright, close together at the bottom of a pan. Pop the pan into a hot oven and bake for twenty minutes. Serve piping hot.