No. 2865

Hard-Boiled Eggs, Russian Style

Œufs Durs a la Russe.

Boil six eggs hard, the same as for Aurora (No. 2857); cut them in two lengthwise, remove the yolks, and chop up separately two ounces of ham, four ounces of tongue, and four ounces of chicken, mingling all together with bechamel sauce (No. 409); pound the yolks with half as much butter. Put a bed of the chicken salpicon on a dish capable of going into the oven, range the halved egg-whites over and cover with the remainder of it; bestrew with bread-crumbs and parmesan cheese, pour over butter and bake in a moderate oven; decorate around with some round caviare canapes (No. 777) and serve.

← No. 2864 Hard-Boiled Eggs, New York Style Eggs & Omelets No. 2866 Fried Eggs a la Eugene Andre →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already knows the house sauces, so the page assumes a good deal. A few decisions have to be made before you start.

The unexplained yolksThe pounded yolk-and-butter paste is never given a destination in the text. One reasonable solution is to pipe or spoon it back into the hollowed whites before they are bedded in the salpicon; another is to work it into the bechamel to enrich the meat mixture. Either is defensible, but decide before you assemble.
SalpiconNot a garnish in the modern sense but a bound dice: ham, tongue and chicken cut small and uniform, then held together with enough thick béchamel to make a spreadable mass, not a stew. Keep the sauce stiff or the dish weeps in the oven.
Moderate ovenRoughly 350F by modern reckoning; Ranhofer gives no temperature. The dish is fully cooked going in and needs only to heat through and colour the crumb and parmesan, roughly 15 to 20 minutes. A brief pass under the broiler at the end will colour the top, though the recipe calls only for baking; a long bake toughens the whites.
Hard-boilingRanhofer's cross-reference is to his own method. Ten to twelve minutes for large eggs, then straight into ice water so the yolks lift out clean and unmarked by the grey-green ring.
TongueCured beef tongue, bought cooked and sliced from a deli, is the practical substitute for the boiled tongue a well-stocked nineteenth-century larder would have had on hand. It carries much of the seasoning in the salpicon, so taste before adding salt.
The caviare canapesCross-referenced to No. 777, these are small rounds of bread or croutons with caviar. They are decoration for a service platter and can be left off entirely without touching the dish itself.
Proportions and yieldTen ounces of meat to twelve egg-white halves is a generous ratio; the eggs sit in the salpicon rather than the reverse. It serves four to six as a luncheon or supper entree.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in about 3,500 numbered entries, each leaning on the others through cross-references the way a professional kitchen leans on its stock pot. The "a la Russe" label here is doing what it usually did on American and French menus of the period: signalling caviar, and beyond that a general air of the Russian service that had reshaped European dining in the mid-nineteenth century, with courses brought in sequence rather than laid out all at once. There is nothing particularly Russian about the salpicon of ham, tongue and chicken bound in bechamel, which is thoroughly French and thoroughly typical of how a hotel kitchen turned yesterday's cooked meats into today's garnish. Stuffed and gratineed hard-boiled eggs of this kind filled a specific slot on the long Delmonico's card, as a light entree or a supper dish, and the number of variations Ranhofer gives them, running through several consecutive entries, shows how much work the egg was expected to do.