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Poached Eggs Bourguignonne
Glaze one tablespoonful of meat into a saucepan with one pint of broth or consomme, and boil for a few minutes; add two eggs and poach for a minute and a quarter. Carefully lift the eggs out with a skimmer, and lay them gently on a hot dish. Repeat the operation with ten more eggs, two at a time; when all are on the dish, sprinkle over one ounce of grated Parmesan cheese and place it in a hot oven for one minute to brown. Reduce the gravy in which the eggs were poached to half its original quantity. Pour it carefully around, but not over them, and serve.
A dozen eggs poached in fortified consommé rather than water, glazed under heat with Parmesan. The technique is sound; the timings and vessel assumptions need translating.
- "Glaze of meat"This is glace de viande — brown stock reduced to a syrupy, nearly solid concentrate. A tablespoon of commercial demi-glace or a good reduced veal stock does the same job. It is there to give the poaching liquid enough body to become a sauce.
- A minute and a quarter is too shortA minute and a quarter is short -- A large modern egg needs about 3 minutes in barely-simmering liquid for a set white and liquid yolk. Judge by the white, not the clock.
- Poaching liquid, not waterThere is no vinegar here, so the whites will spread more than you expect. Keep the consommé at a bare shiver — 180–185F — and slide the eggs in from a cup close to the surface.
- Strain before reducingTwelve eggs will leave the consommé cloudy with loose albumen. Pass it through a fine sieve before reducing by half, or the sauce poured around the dish will look grey and flecked.
- Hold the eggs warmTwo at a time means the first pair sits for ten minutes. Slip them into a bowl of warm (140F) salted water as they come out, then drain on a towel before arranging on the dish, or they will be cold at the centre.
- "A hot oven for one minute"The book gives no figures, but a period "hot oven" is conventionally taken as somewhere in the region of 450F, and one minute is only enough if the dish and oven are already fierce. A broiler at close range does the browning better and faster, and will not carry on cooking the yolks.
- Sauce around, not overThe instruction is the hinge of the dish. Pouring the reduction over the eggs washes off the Parmesan crust and slackens the browning; a moat of dark glossy sauce against the white is the whole point.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a first course, or four at a substantial breakfast. One ounce of Parmesan for twelve eggs is restrained; two will not hurt.
The name promises Burgundy and does not quite deliver: à la bourguignonne conventionally means red wine, onions and mushrooms, and the Burgundian original of poached eggs in wine is œufs en meurette, still a Dijon standard. This version substitutes consommé strengthened with meat glaze -- both things a large hotel kitchen would have had standing ready, so that a cook working à la minute could pull a sauce out of them in the time it took to poach an egg. The looseness is typical of American hotel cookery of the period, when French garnish names were applied as much for the tone they set on a menu card as for strict fidelity. What survives intact is the method: poaching eggs in a liquid that is then reduced into their own sauce, so nothing of the flavour is thrown away with the water.