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Eggs and Sauce Robert
Boil twelve eggs for fifteen minutes, quarter them, after removing the shells, and have ready the above sauce, in which the eggs should be placed just long enough to heat them thoroughly; gently introduce them into the sauce (see ROBERT SAUCE) that they may not get broken, and serve hot. Allow two eggs for each person.
A dish that is really an assembly: hard-boiled eggs warmed through in Sauce Robert, which must be made first from the separate entry. The two things worth attention are the egg timing and the mustard.
- Fifteen minutes is too longLarge eggs lowered into already-boiling water are set through in 10-12 minutes; at 15 the yolks go chalky and the grey-green ring forms at the edge. Cool them straight away in cold water and the shells come off cleanly.
- Quartering without wrecking themA thin blade wiped between cuts, or a length of thread drawn through, gives clean quarters. Chilled eggs cut far better than warm ones, which is another reason to cool them before peeling.
- What Sauce Robert isClassically a brown sauce: onions sweated in butter, deglazed with white wine or vinegar, built out with demi-glace or a well-reduced brown stock, finished with mustard. A good beef or veal stock reduced hard stands in for the demi-glace of a period kitchen. Check the book's own ROBERT SAUCE entry for its proportions.
- Never boil the mustardThe mustard goes in off the heat at the very end. Boiled, it turns bitter and loses its point, and the whole character of the sauce with it.
- "Just long enough to heat them"Two or three minutes in sauce held below a simmer. Longer and the whites toughen and begin to shed into the sauce, clouding it.
- YieldTwelve eggs at two per person feeds six as a light supper or luncheon dish; make enough sauce to coat them.
- ServingA hot dish and hot plates matter more than usual here, since neither eggs nor a mustard-finished sauce hold or reheat well. Rice, toast or plain boiled potatoes take up the sauce.
Sauce Robert is among the oldest named sauces in the French repertoire, in print by the sixteenth century — Rabelais mentions it, and the name is traditionally attributed to a cook called Robert, though the attribution is folklore rather than record. Its constant elements across four centuries are onion, vinegar or wine, and mustard; the brown-stock base is the nineteenth-century codification, and Escoffier lists it as a derivative of demi-glace.