#baked eggs

This morning for brunch I wanted to use some of my Kraslice (Easter eggs) before I used the egg shells in a ritual this afternoon. I decided to dig through a cookbook I found a month or so back.

It is a joint project between museums in Austria and Czechia to collect recipes from 1750 to 1918 (my great-grandparents left in 1912—a part of the Slavic diaspora that was getting out before WWI) that were going back and forth across the borders as Czech and Moravian domestic workers went back and forth—introducing Czech folk recipes into Austria and Austrian recipes back home to southern Bohemia and Zjnomo (in southern Moravia where my great grandparents were from). Today’s recipe is from Ivančice—about 30 km from my great-grandparents village.

The first step was to peel and halve the eggs and make a filling. Of course, these old recipes so often do not give proper quantities! I decided to use four eggs. I melted 3 TB of butter and whipped the egg yolks into it and added 2 TB of cream and salt and pepper. The recipe said to mix in egg yolks too, but I didn’t want to waste an egg white and decided after taste testing that it was fine without it.

I then filled the eggs and scrambled one more fresh egg and poured it over. The recipe said to push the two halves back together into a whole egg, but further down it said you could also do it in a layer of halves. When I tried to stick them back together it didn’t work very well so I decided to leave them as halves.

I then sprinkled over a layer of bread crumbs and put the eggs in the oven at 350°F for 10 minutes.

Instead of making the ragout in the recipe with mushrooms, green peas, and asparagus I decided to use the leftover houbová omáčka (mushroom sauce) from the řízek I made on Svatý Jiří (St. George) Eve and use some freshly foraged greens in place of the asparagus and peas. After washing and soaking some lyre leaf sage leaves in a vinegar/water bath, I chopped them and sautéed them, and added them to the houbová omáčka—which I poured over the baked eggs when I took them out of the oven.