No. 2851

Eggs au Miroir a la Jockey Club

Œufs au Miroir a la Jockey Club

Suppress the thin skin from one half of a white veal kidney; divide it, take out the fibrous fat, and then cut the meat into small dice. Heat some butter in a pan, put with it the kidneys, season and toss on a bright fire to have them cook rapidly, then remove with a skimmer, and set into a small vessel. Into the pan the kidneys were stewed in put two or three spoonfuls of half-glaze sauce (No. 413), and as much tomato puree (No. 730), reduce all to a third, mixing in a spoonful of Madeira wine; boil up once or twice, then take it from the fire and return the kidneys, also half as much cooked truffles cut exactly the same size as these; the sauce should be consistent. Cook six eggs au mirior on a large buttered dish, that is, baste the egg yolk with boiling butter several times while cooking in the oven; this will make them very glossy; cut them into rounds with a pastry cutter (three inches in diameter), take up with a palette, and dress in a circle on the bottom of a dish; heat the kidneys without boiling, and dress them inside the circle.

← No. 2850 Eggs Eggs & Omelets No. 2852 Eggs au Miroir a la Lully →

For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's composed egg dish: baked eggs trimmed to neat discs, ringed around a ragout of veal kidney and truffle. Two things carry it — the gloss on the yolks and the fact that the garnish is warmed, never simmered.

The hinge: heat the kidneys, do not boil themSautéed kidney turns grainy and livery the moment it is brought back to a boil in sauce. Bring the finished sauce to just below a simmer, slip the dice in, and hold them there only long enough to warm through.
Au miroir means basted, not coveredThe mirror finish comes from spooning boiling butter over the yolks repeatedly as the eggs set, which cooks and glazes the yolk surface. Ranhofer gives neither an oven temperature nor a time; use a shallow buttered gratin dish in a moderate oven and judge by eye, the whites set with the yolks still soft.
Half-glaze sauceRanhofer's No. 413 is his half-glaze, the demi-glace of the period. A good reduced veal or beef stock, thickened slightly, stands in for it. Tomato purée here means Ranhofer's own preparation at No. 730, not tinned concentrate — if using paste, thin it and use far less.
"Two or three spoonfuls"The spoonful is not a standardised measure here; read it as a generous tablespoon or so of each. The target is stated instead as a result — reduce to a third, until the sauce coats the kidney dice and holds them together.
Veal kidneyOrder it from a butcher; supermarkets rarely stock it. Half a kidney is perhaps 4 to 6 oz of trimmed meat, depending on the animal. Strip the membrane, cut out the white core fat, and cut small dice, then sear them fast in hot butter so they colour without weeping — overcrowding the pan steams them and they toughen.
Truffles"Half as much cooked truffles" means half the volume of the kidney dice, cut to match. Preserved black truffle is the closest thing to what Ranhofer used. Truffle in oil or paste is not the same ingredient; sautéed cremini cut to the same dice gives colour and bite if truffle is out of reach, and the dish should then be understood as an approximation.
Cutting the eggsA 3-inch round cutter takes the egg cleanly only once the white is fully set and the dish has cooled a minute. Press straight down, lift with an offset spatula, and arrange the discs overlapping in a ring. Reserve the trimmings for another use rather than trying to patch with them.
YieldSix eggs serve three as a first course, or two generously. Assemble at the last moment — the sauce cools quickly on the plate and the gloss dulls.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the vast codification of the kitchen he ran at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows how that kitchen worked: a numbered cross-reference system in which a single egg dish leans on two other recipes for its sauce. Œufs au miroir — mirror eggs — take their name from the sheen the repeated butter basting leaves on the yolk, the French counterpart to the English shirred egg. "À la Jockey Club" is one of the period's club-and-society garnish names, of the same family as à la Rothschild or à la Talleyrand, and it is sometimes associated, loosely rather than as settled convention, with kidney and truffle in a Madeira-scented brown sauce; the naming is honorific rather than a record of who first ate it. Ranhofer runs the miroir egg through a run of variations in sequence, each distinguished only by what sits inside the ring, which tells you a good deal about how a nineteenth-century grand-restaurant menu was built: one technique, endlessly re-dressed.