Steamed Eggs

Break the shells and drop the contents carefully into buttered nappies of stone china. Put them into the perforated pan of a steamer, fit on the lid and keep the water below at a hard boil for seven minutes, or until the whites are set.

Shirred Eggs

Butter the nappies and break the eggs into them, one in each. Arrange in a perforated pan or in a broad wire basket and set in boiling water on top of the range. Leave them in the water until the white is set, when take up the nappies, put a bit of butter and a dust of salt and pepper upon each, and send at once to table. Eat from the nappies.

The flavor of eggs cooked in this way is considered more delicate than when they are prepared in any other manner. They imbibe no taste from the lime of the shell, as sometimes happens when they are boiled, and are not made insipid by contact with the boiling water as when poached.

Poached Or Dropped Eggs

The neatest way of poaching eggs is to cook them in muffin-rings or in rings made expressly for this purpose. Put the rings or the poacher in shallow boiling water, slightly salted, and with a tablespoonful of vinegar in it. Let the water begin to bubble again before you break an egg into each ring. Draw to the side of the range, where the water will just simmer about the edge of the pan, and watch the eggs until they are "set" all through. As usually poached or "dropped," eggs are soft in the middle and hard on the edges.

Have ready rounds of delicately browned toast thick enough not to curl with the heat; butter them well, put a teaspoonful of boiling, salted water in the centre of each, and lay an egg upon it.

The dish is made more savory if you will wet the toast with hot stock or consomme. It is especially nice when wet with oyster-liquor.

Creamed Poached Eggs

Heat a cupful of cream with a pinch of soda in it, in a small frying-pan. When it boils break into it an indubitably fresh egg and cook three minutes, or until it is set. Take it out with a per-forated spoon, lay upon buttered toast in a hot-water dish, and drop in a second, then a third. Put a tiny bit of butter upon each egg, dust with salt and pepper, and serve.

A single egg poached in half a cupful of hot cream makes a delicious and nourishing breakfast for an invalid. An epicurean bachelor cooked two eggs in cream every morning for ten years in his apartment with a chafing-dish, and, with strong, hot coffee made over a spirit-lamp, and two crisp rolls left by a French baker, asked for nothing more luxurious.