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Peasants' Eggs
For six people put on the fire two handfuls of sorrel, reduce it to a puree, and add two dessert-spoonfuls of cream, a lump of butter the size of a pigeon's egg, pepper, salt. Take six hard-boiled eggs and, crumbling out the yolks, add them to the sorrel puree. Place the whites (which you should have cut longways) on a hot dish, and pour over them the puree of sorrel; sprinkle the top with breadcrumbs, and put bits of butter on it also. Place in the oven for ten minutes, and serve garnished with tomatoes.
Two Recipes for Tomatoes and Eggs Take some good tomatoes, but not too ripe. Cut them down from top to bottom, take out the pulp, and in each half tomato put half a hard-boiled egg. Arrange them on a dish, and pour round them a good mayonnaise, to which you have added some chopped parsley. Take some tomatoes not too ripe, and cut them in half horizontally. Take out the pulp, so that you have two half-cases from each tomato. Break an egg into each tomato and sprinkle it well with cheese. Place them all in the oven, till the eggs are set, and decorate with sprigs of parsley.
Three related dishes, all built on hard-boiled eggs. The sorrel gratin is the substantial one; the two tomato preparations are footnotes meant as garnish or a light course.
- Two handfuls of sorrelA few ounces of leaves, which is a large heap raw and almost nothing cooked. Sorrel collapses to a khaki puree in two or three minutes over moderate heat with no added water; it needs only the water clinging to the washed leaves.
- Butter the size of a pigeon's eggAbout 1 tablespoon, perhaps a shade more. A dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons, so the cream amounts to a scant 1½ tablespoons.
- Use a non-reactive panSorrel is high in oxalic acid and will turn grey and metallic in bare cast iron or aluminium. Stainless steel or enamel keeps the flavour clean.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Ten minutes only makes sense in a hot oven, around 400-425F, and the point is to brown the crumbs and heat the whites through, not to cook anything further.
- Halving the whites"Cut longways" means lengthwise, so each white becomes two boat-shaped halves that sit cupped-side up and hold the purée. Twelve halves for six people is a modest portion; it is a first course or a supper dish with bread.
- Seasoning the puréeSorrel is aggressively sour on its own. The cream and butter are there to blunt it, and it will take more salt than you expect; taste before it goes over the eggs.
- Tomatoes not too ripeDeliberate. Firm, slightly underripe fruit holds its shape when hollowed and does not weep into the mayonnaise or the baking dish. Salt the drained shells and invert them for ten minutes before filling.
- The baked tomato and eggWhole eggs broken into tomato cases need 15-20 minutes at about 375F for set whites and still-soft yolks. Sit them close together in a dish so they cannot tip.
Sorrel was a kitchen-garden staple across northern France and Belgium long before it became a specialist item, valued precisely because it gave acidity in spring when lemons were an expensive import; the classic potage à l'oseille and sorrel sauce for fish belong to the same habit. Calling the dish "peasants' eggs" points at its economy rather than any documented rural origin: hard-boiled eggs, a handful of a weedy perennial that grows without attention, and enough butter and crumbs to make it a hot dish. Books of this kind are often associated with the First World War, when Belgian cooking is said to have been recorded and published abroad partly as a fund-raising and refugee-relief effort, though none of that can be confirmed from this page.