No. 2511

Garnishing of Eggs, Moscovite

Garniture d'Oeufs Moscovite

Have a thin layer of aspic jelly (No. 103) three-eighths of an inch thick; harden on ice on a small baking sheet; from it cut out with a hot pastry cutter seven or eight rings sufficiently large to hold up the eggs inside of them. Cut crossways, two-thirds from the top, seven or eight shelled hard-boiled eggs; take out the yolks and pound them with a few anchovies and a piece of butter; rub this through a coarse sieve so it falls through like vermicelli, and keep cold. Scoop out the insides of the eggs lightly with a vegetable spoon, and fill them with a fine salpicon of crawfish mingled with thick tartar sauce (No. 631); leave for two minutes on ice; smooth the preparation into a dome form, and lay the eggs inside the jelly rings, to stand for a quarter of an hour longer on ice. After they are removed take up the vermicelli yolks with a fork, and cover the domes of the eggs with it.

← No. 2510 Garnishing of Halved Hard-Boiled Eggs Garnishings for Cold Dishes No. 2512 Garnishing of Eggs, Polish Style →

For the Modern Kitchen

A cold buffet garnish from Delmonico's kitchen: stuffed egg cups seated in rings of aspic and topped with sieved yolk. Everything depends on keeping the components cold and firm, so work in stages with the tray on ice or in the refrigerator.

Work cold, start to finishThe aspic rings soften within minutes at room temperature and the filling is bound with mayonnaise-based tartar sauce. Assemble on a chilled sheet, return it to the refrigerator between steps, and serve within an hour of plating.
The aspic layerThree-eighths of an inch is about 1 cm — pour the jelly into a small rimmed sheet pan so it sets to that depth rather than trying to trim it later. Ranhofer's No. 103 is a clarified meat aspic; a firm chicken or veal stock jelly set with enough gelatine to cut cleanly is the equivalent.
Hot pastry cutterDip a round cutter in hot water and wipe it before each cut. It melts through the jelly instead of fracturing it, and it releases the ring cleanly. Cut the outer circle first, then the inner one, so the ring holds an egg snugly.
"Cut crossways, two-thirds from the top"The wording is ambiguous, and taken literally it removes the upper two-thirds of the egg. Since the cup has to hold a salpicon filling and be smoothed into a dome, the sense is likely a deep cup from the broad end with a shallower lid taken off; cut to suit the eggs you have.
Vermicelli yolksPound the yolks with anchovy and butter until smooth, then push the paste through a coarse sieve or a potato ricer directly over a chilled plate so the strands fall loose. Do not stir them afterwards or they compact into paste again.
How much anchovy"A few anchovies and a piece of butter" is genuinely unquantified. For eight yolks, two to three fillets and roughly a tablespoon of soft butter gives a paste that still tastes of egg; go by taste, since salt-packed and oil-packed fillets differ sharply in strength.
Salpicon of crawfishA salpicon is simply a fine, even dice — here cooked crayfish tails cut to about 3 mm. Small cooked shrimp or picked lobster stand in without changing the character. Bind lightly: too much sauce and the dome will not hold its shape.
A "vegetable spoon"The small scoop sold today as a melon baller or parisienne cutter. Its purpose is to hollow the white a little without tearing it.
YieldSeven or eight pieces. It sits in the book's chapter of garnishings for cold dishes, so it is a border or accompaniment for a cold platter rather than a course on its own.

A Little History

This is entry No. 2511 in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it belongs to a long chapter of garnishes whose only job was to decorate the rim of a cold dish on a buffet. "Moscovite" in nineteenth-century French kitchen usage signalled a Russian manner, usually meaning caviar, crayfish, or a chilled aspic presentation — the fashion for service à la russe, with dishes brought out in sequence and cold platters elaborately masked in jelly, had reshaped grand restaurant cooking from mid-century onward. Crayfish were a standard luxury garnish of the period, and the trick of forcing seasoned yolk through a sieve so it falls in threads was a familiar piece of garde-manger work; plain sieved yolk is now generally known as mimosa, though how early that name attached to it is unclear. In a kitchen of this scale the garnish was itself a small composed dish, the work of the cold-larder station.