My mother used to make these when I was a kid, and I later learned how to cook them for myself. We called them gas house eggs, and I have no idea why.
If I have some ham lunchmeat in the house, I’ll generally fry up a slice of it to eat with the dish…and now I will have to try it with a slice of cheese, too.
I don’t like liquid yolks, though I do enjoy thoroughly cooked yolks, either fried or scrambled or boiled. In the case of this dish, I usually intentionally break the yolk so it will cook completely without having to overcook the white so much that it gets browned.
I use a drinking glass to cut out the circle in the middle, and of course I fry up that circle as I’m cooking the egg. I put the bread frame in the skillet, add butter in the hole, put butter on the side, wait for the butter to melt, then crack an egg into the hole and drop the circle on the butter on the side. Then I break the yolk. I add some butter to the top of the egg and the circle of bread, and flip when required. I salt the egg a little bit, but otherwise I don’t season it.
-Never had it growing up; always READ about it, though. Add me to the list that thought of it as a Brit thing.
-Love it as an adult, though I don’t particularly care for eggs and rarely eat them, but…I like this
-I have always thought of it as Toad in a Hole, though I looked it up some time ago and apparantly that is NOT toad in a hole!
I do a variation of this for the boys’ Sunday breakfast quite often. My method is:
1/ cut the hole out of the bread;
2/ seperate out the yolk and put it aside;
3/ mix the white with a tiny splash of milk to make it runnier;
4/ soak the holed bread in the white/milk mix, turning it over till the bread is completely saturated
5/ put the soaked bread on the pan and put the yolk in the hole.
You can cook it one side up (often have to put a lid over the pan to get the yolk to cook if you do this) or turn it over.
I serve with maple syrup. We call it “sunny eggs”.
Heard of them, but I’ve just never bothered with the whole rigamarole of cutting a hole in the bread, etc. I just fry up the eggs, take them out of the pan, add some butter to the hot pan, throw in two pieces of bread and slide them around until buttered, heat until toasted. Two nice, pan fried pieces of toast (usually sourdough) and two eggs.
Never heard of it until V for Vendetta. Now I make it all the time. Especially when I’m watching that movie again; I always get the craving for “Eggy in a Basket.”
I think the version my mom made was basically scrambled egg in french toast. She cut out holes in the bread, mixed up the eggs in a bowl with seasoning and a bit of milk and onion and stuff like that (it varied), and then dunked the holed bread in the mix (like french toast). Then she put the bread in the pan, let it grill, flipped the bread over, and added a half cup or so of the egg mixture into the holes. She also grilled the cut out holes dunked in the mix.
I call it “egg in a basket,” but that may be because that’s what Cracker Barrel calls it. I don’t remember my brother (who introduced me to it as a child) calling it anything in particular.
You have to be very, very careful. My son made it, took a look at about 15 minutes in and the egg whites were still raw. 5 minutes later, the yolk was cooked hard. Even with the hard yolk, it was pretty good.
I made these (which are called egg hats*, btw) for the first time today, thanks to this thread.
I think I’ll make them whenever I want a quick breakfast (ie, one that doesn’t involve bacon, sausage and hashbrowns) that’s not cold cereal or a couple poptarts in future. Tasty.
Never made them before, but I’d heard of them, and Egg Hats is the first name I ever heard for them.
How many names can a simple breakfast have? My mom made them for us and called them “one eyes”, almost the same as someone above but not quite.
I am a runny yolk guy, my wife is ‘hard scrambled’ and my son ‘over hard.’ Not sure how that happened.
As for the broken yolk saying, there is a wonderful little place in Indianapolis called Patachou, I think, that serves a ‘broken yolk sandwich’ for breakfast. It has wonderful bread, some cheese and bacon or ham, and a broken yolk egg on top, the yolk broken only after the still runny egg is placed on the sandwich. So not the hard yolk type at all, quite good.