No. 2852

Eggs au Miroir a la Lully

Œufs au Miroir a la Lully

Butter a large dish or baking pan; break in six eggs, pour boiling butter over the yolks, and put in a very hot oven or under a salamander (Fig. 123); when done properly cut them rounded with a pastry cutter two and a quarter to two and a half inches in diameter; take them up with a large palette and dress on a dish on slices of ham of the same dimensions, and three-sixteenths of an inch thick, and the ham on croutons of fried bread cut the same, having taken them from the kernel part of a good raw him; fry them in butter in a pan, turning them over. Fill the center of this circle with a hash made of sliced and seasoned ducks' livers mingled with a little brown Madeira wine sauce (No. 492).

← No. 2851 Eggs au Miroir a la Jockey Club Eggs & Omelets No. 2853 Eggs au Miroir a la Meyerbeer →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A composed shirred-egg dish from Delmonico's: eggs baked glossy-side-up, trimmed to discs, and stacked on ham and fried bread with a duck-liver hash in the middle. Nearly all the difficulty is in the assembly, not the cooking.

The hinge: stop while the yolks are liquidThe hinge: stop while the yolks are still soft — Au miroir refers to the glossy, mirror-like surface the yolks keep under the boiling butter poured over them. A few minutes in a very hot oven is usually enough; once the yolk sets hard and dulls, the dish has lost the effect it is named for. The whites still need to be firm enough to cut and lift in one piece.
Salamander and "very hot oven"A salamander was an overhead radiant heater; the modern equivalent is the broiler, rack set a few inches down. Ranhofer gives no temperature; "very hot" is conventionally read as the top of the domestic range, and the buttered dish should go in already hot so the whites set from below as well.
Cutting the roundsA 2¼-2½ inch plain cutter, pressed straight down through the set white, leaves an awful lot of trimming behind. Cooking each egg in a buttered metal ring or a shallow individual gratin dish gives the same disc with no waste, and the eggs lift cleanly with an offset spatula (Ranhofer's "palette").
"The kernel part of a good raw ham"This is the noix, the solid muscle at the centre of a dry-cured ham, sliced about 3/16 inch thick — thicker than deli ham, thinner than a steak. Uncooked cured ham such as a dry country ham or an unsliced piece of prosciutto answers; it is browned in butter, not served raw.
CroutonsCut the bread with the same cutter so the three discs stack evenly, and fry in butter, turning once. Clarified butter over moderate heat is safer, as whole butter is liable to brown before the bread colours through.
Sauce No. 492Ranhofer's Madeira sauce: a brown espagnole reduced with Madeira. A good reduced veal or beef demi-glace finished with dry Madeira off the heat is the practical substitute — a spoonful or two, only enough to bind the livers.
The duck-liver hashDuck livers cook in a minute or two over high heat and are best still pink inside; slice, season, sear, then fold into the warm sauce rather than simmering them in it. Chicken livers substitute directly.
YieldSix eggs, arranged as a ring with the hash in the centre, serves three as a lunch course or six on a larger menu of the kind this book assumes.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its egg chapter runs to a long series of au miroir variations distinguished mainly by garnish and by name. The names come from the opera house and the clubroom — Meyerbeer, Jockey Club, and here Jean-Baptiste Lully, the Florentine-born composer who ran music at the court of Louis XIV. Naming garnishes after composers and clubs was common in nineteenth-century French kitchens. What the dish does say plainly is how a restaurant of that period thought about eggs: not as a quick breakfast but as a base to be trimmed, stacked, ringed and sauced, with duck livers and Madeira treated as everyday pantry items.