Home › Egg Dishes › Eggs in Brown Butter
Eggs in Brown Butter
Salt and pepper
6 eggs
3 tablespoons butter butter in the pan, add one teaspoon vinegar, and when hot, pour Sauté the eggs in one tablespoon butter until set, season with two tablespoons salt and pepper, and place on a platter. Brown two tablespoons and when hot, pour 1 teaspoon vinegar over the eggs.
BAKED EGGS, OR "EGGS SUR LE PLAT" Use individual baking-dishes and melt one teaspoon of butter allowing one or in each dish. Break the eggs into the dishes, allowing one or pepper, and place a two eggs to a dish. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and place a oven (350° F.) tiny piece of butter on each. Bake in a moderate oven (350° F.) in the baking-dishes until the eggs are set but not hard. Serve in the baking-dishes. .
This is the French oeufs au beurre noir in plain American dress: eggs fried gently in butter, then finished with butter cooked to a nut brown and sharpened with vinegar. The listed quantities are 6 eggs and 3 tablespoons butter, split one tablespoon for frying and two for the sauce.
- The hinge is the butterThe two tablespoons for the sauce want browning properly, until the milk solids toast and the smell turns nutty, which happens fast once the foam subsides. Pulled early it tastes of nothing; a few seconds too far and it is acrid and must be started again.
- Vinegar off the heatVinegar -- The recipe has the teaspoon of vinegar poured over the eggs once the butter is hot; adding it away from the burner reduces spitting, so stand back. A plain cider or white wine vinegar suits it better than anything sweetened or heavily aged.
- "Until set"Means whites firm and opaque, yolks still soft. Cook over moderate rather than high heat and cover the pan for the last half minute if the tops are lagging; hard yolks defeat the point of the sauce.
- One tablespoon for six eggsThat is a lean amount of fat by modern habit. In a pan that is not well seasoned, use two tablespoons for the frying and keep the two for browning separate.
- Season before saucingSalt and pepper go on the eggs in the pan, not into the brown butter, which needs nothing but the vinegar.
- YieldSix eggs serves three at breakfast, or two if it is the main dish. Have the platter warm, since brown butter congeals quickly on cold china.
Butter cooked dark and cut with vinegar is a French pan sauce still in ordinary use, served over eggs, skate and brains under the names beurre noir and, when stopped earlier, beurre noisette. Butterick's recipe books were sold alongside the company's dress patterns to a broad middle-class readership, and this entry gives the technique without the vocabulary. That the following entry keeps its French name in quotation marks, eggs sur le plat, while this one is simply called eggs in brown butter, shows how selectively that borrowing was done.