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Egg Dishes
No. 200. Uova ai Tartufi (Eggs with Truffles) Ingredients: Eggs, butter, cream, truffles, Veluté sauce, croûtons.
Beat up six eggs, pass them through a sieve, and put them into a saucepan with two ounces of butter and two tablespoonsful of cream. Put the saucepan in a bain-marie, and stir so that the eggs may not adhere. Sautez some slices of truffle in butter, cover them with Veluté sauce (No. 2) and a glass of Marsala, and add them to the eggs. Serve very hot with fried and glazed croûtons.
Instead of truffles you can use asparagus tips, peas, or cooked ham.
Cut up three or four tomatoes, and put them into a stewpan with a piece of butter the size of a walnut and a clove of garlic with a cut in it. Put the lid on the stewpan and cook till quite soft, then take out the garlic, strain the tomatoes through a fine strainer into a bain-marie, beat up two eggs and add them to the tomatoes, and stir till quite thick, then put in two tablespoonsful of grated cheese, and serve on toast.
Two dishes are run together here: soft eggs finished with truffle in a Marsala-spiked velouté, and, from "Cut up three or four tomatoes," a separate tomato-and-egg dish served on toast. Read them as separate recipes.
- The bain-marie is the whole methodThese are not pan-scrambled eggs. The saucepan sits in simmering water and the eggs are stirred constantly until they thicken to a loose custard, which takes 10-20 minutes. Direct heat will curdle them before the texture arrives.
- Passing through a sieveBeaten eggs pushed through a fine sieve leave the chalazae and any unbroken albumen behind, which is what gives the finished eggs their smoothness. Worth doing; it takes half a minute.
- Velouté No. 2Velut",
- "A glass of Marsala"In this period a wine glass is roughly 2 to 4 fl oz, and at the top of that range it will thin the sauce and taste raw. Reduce the Marsala with the truffle slices until it is nearly syrupy before the velouté goes in.
- Truffles and the substitutionsFresh black or white truffle at the quantity implied is a luxury purchase; the recipe's own alternatives of asparagus tips, peas or diced cooked ham are not a compromise but standard practice. Truffle oil is not a substitute in a dish this plain, as it reads chemical against sweet eggs.
- Glazed croûtonsFry bread fingers in butter, then brush with a little reduced meat glaze or thick stock and dry them briefly in a hot oven so they take a shine. Plain fried bread is fine if you have no glaze.
- The tomato versionPeeled or not, the tomatoes are cooked to a pulp and sieved, so skins and seeds are removed; the garlic clove is scored, cooks in the pulp for perfume, and is pulled out. Then the eggs go in over the water bath and thicken as before.
- Grated cheeseAn Italian book of this date means Parmesan, or a Parmesan-type grating cheese. Add it off the heat so it melts into the eggs rather than tightening them.
- YieldSix eggs with truffle serve three or four as a first course. The tomato version, on two eggs, serves two on toast.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) was written by Mrs. W. G. Waters around a Boccaccio-style frame of a house party and ten days of Italian dinners, an Italian repertoire presented to English readers at a time when French cooking dominated the London table. That double allegiance shows in this entry, where the Italian title sits over a technique and a sauce that are straightforwardly French professional practice: eggs stirred to a custard in a bain-marie, moistened with velout outon, and set on glazed cro tons. Truffle and egg is an old pairing on both sides of the Alps, the reasoning being that egg fat carries the aroma better than almost anything else, which is also why truffles were often stored in a jar with eggs so the perfume would pass through the shells. The tomato variant tacked on at the end is the humbler dish and probably the more revealing one: butter, tomato, a scored garlic clove withdrawn before serving, grated cheese, toast, and nothing else.