No. 2857

Hard-Boiled Eggs and Aurora

Œufs Durs et a l'Aurore

These should not be cooked too long, still they only attain a proper degree after they have boiled ten to twelve minutes. On removing from the fire they must be thrown into cold water, and left to cool for at least fifteen minutes; drain and shell, without injuring any of the white part, which should remain intact.

Aurora.—Cut lengthwise in halves eight hard-boiled eggs; take out the yolks and divide each halved white in four parts; put these in a sautoir, season with salt, prepared red pepper (No. 168) and nutmeg, and dilute with well-reduced bechamel (No. 409), into which mix finely cut-up chives; dress this in a baking dish. Rub the yolks through a wire sieve directly over the eggs, besprinkle with salt, brush over with hazel-nut butter (No. 567), and heat for a few moments in a hot oven; serve at once. The chives may be replaced by mushrooms and truffles, both finely minced, adding to the bechamel a quarter as much soubise sauce (No. 543).

← No. 2856 Boiled Eggs Eggs & Omelets No. 2858 Hard-Boiled Eggs a la Bennett →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's method is a two-part entry: a general rule for hard-boiling, then the garnished dish itself. Most of the work is in the sauce and the sieved yolk finish, which must go on last.

The hinge: the yolk goes on at the endThe sieved yolk is the finishing touch, and plausibly the source of the name — the dawn colour scattered over the sauced whites just before a brief pass through the oven, though Ranhofer does not say so. Sieve it directly over the dish so it falls in loose threads; stirred into the sauce it disappears and the effect is lost.
Boiling timeTen to twelve minutes gives a fully set, slightly chalky yolk, which may show a faint grey-green ring. Nine to ten minutes is enough for eggs that will be sieved anyway, and the cold-water plunge Ranhofer insists on is still the correct move — the fifteen minutes in cold water helps the shells come away cleanly.
SautoirA shallow, straight-sided pan with a wide base — a 10-inch skillet or sauté pan does the job. It is used here only to warm the whites through in the sauce, not to brown them.
Prepared red pepper (No. 168)A cross-reference to Ranhofer's own red-pepper seasoning, not reproduced here. Plain cayenne, used sparingly, is the practical substitute; the dish should be warm rather than hot.
Hazel-nut butter (No. 567)Beurre noisette — butter cooked until the milk solids brown and it smells of hazelnuts. No hazelnuts are involved. Brush it on just before the dish goes in the oven; it browns further under heat and can turn bitter if made too dark to begin with.
Well-reduced béchamelThe sauce needs to be thick enough to coat the egg whites and hold them in place — closer to a spoon-coating cream than a pouring sauce. Thin béchamel will pool and the sieved yolk will sink into it.
SoubiseThe variant sauce (No. 543) is an onion purée sauce, traditionally onions sweated in butter, cooked with rice or béchamel and passed through a sieve. A quarter part folded into the béchamel gives sweetness against the truffle and mushroom.
A hot ovenRanhofer gives no temperature; roughly 425–450°F is a reasonable modern reading. Everything in the dish is already cooked; the oven is there to glaze the butter and warm the sauce, three or four minutes at most. Longer and the whites toughen.
YieldEight eggs, halved and quartered, makes a first course or luncheon dish for four.

A Little History

À l'aurore — "dawn" — is a classical French kitchen term for a dish given a rosy or golden tint, most often by tomato worked into a cream sauce. Here Ranhofer instead uses the sieved yolk itself as the colouring, scattered over the pale béchamel like sunrise over cloud. Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the restaurant's working system set down in print: thousands of numbered entries that cross-reference each other, so a single egg dish sends the cook to four other pages for its pepper, its béchamel, its browned butter and its soubise. The hard-boiled egg appears in that system not as a plain thing but as a vehicle — the whites become a base for sauce, the yolks a garnish — which is how a restaurant kitchen with a standing supply of mother sauces would naturally think about it.