No. 2516

Garnishing of Whole Hard-Boiled Egg-Yolks

Garniture de Jaunes d'Œufs Durs Entiers

Have some small, even-sized hard-boiled egg-yolks; stand them on rings cut from gherkins or beef tongue; lay in a circle a fillet of anchovy two-thirds the height of these yolks; besprinkle the inside of this circle with finely chopped truffles, and on top place a green pistachio nut (Fig. 495).

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is an assembly job rather than a cooked dish, and everything depends on getting yolks out whole. Ranhofer assumes a kitchen with a dedicated cold-larder cook and a drawer of small knives and cutters.

The hinge: unbroken yolksCook the eggs at a bare simmer, cool them fully in cold water, then peel and cut the whites lengthwise and ease the yolk out with a small spoon rather than squeezing it. Warm or hastily boiled eggs give yolks that crumble at the seam, and a cracked yolk cannot be stood upright.
Small, even yolksThe recipe wants uniformity. Use the smallest eggs you can find, or buy quail eggs and treat them the same way; a modern large or extra-large egg yolk is too tall and heavy for the anchovy collar to sit at two-thirds height convincingly.
Gherkin and tongue ringsThe rings are cut crosswise from a fat sour gherkin or from a slice of cooked, pressed beef tongue, using a small plain cutter to punch out the centre. Pickled tongue is still sold by good delicatessens; a firm slice of any cured, pressed meat serves the same structural purpose.
Anchovy filletsSalt-packed anchovies rinsed and filleted are closest to what Ranhofer used. Oil-packed fillets work but blot them dry, or the oil will bleed into the chopped truffle and dull it.
TrufflesThe truffles behind a book of this kind would most likely have been black truffles, commonly supplied preserved in tins. For a few teaspoons of chopped garnish, tinned or jarred truffle peelings are the sensible modern substitute; truffle oil is not, as it will run.
PistachiosBlanch shelled unsalted pistachios in boiling water for a minute and slip off the skins to get the bright green the plate depends on. Salted cocktail pistachios are the wrong colour and the wrong seasoning.
Hold and serve coldAssemble on the serving dish or on the item being garnished, not on a tray to be moved later. Keep refrigerated and eat the same day; the yolks dry and crust at the surface within a few hours uncovered.
YieldThe original gives none, as this is a garnish rather than a course. Count one yolk per guest around a cold galantine, salmon or ham, or three or four to trim a single platter.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summary of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its long sections of garnishings belong to the professional garde-manger, the cold-kitchen station that dressed buffet pieces for banquet service. Constructions like this one, in which a hard-boiled yolk becomes a little pedestalled ornament of anchovy, truffle and pistachio, descend from the decorative cold cookery codified by Carême earlier in the century, where a cold dish was expected to be architecture as much as food and each element was chosen for colour: black truffle, green nut, brown anchovy, the tongue or gherkin ring at the base. The numbered figure reference is to one of the book's engraved plates, since the point of such a garnish was that it be copied exactly. Almost nothing in the assembly adds flavour that the underlying dish needs, which is a fair measure of what banquet service in the 1890s valued.