No. 2871

Fried Eggs with Chopped Parsley

Œufs Frits au Persil hache

Heat clarified butter in a small pan; break two very fresh eggs on a plate, season with salt, and pour them carefully in the pan; fry slowly, and then slip them on a dish, throwing over a little chopped parsley.

← No. 2870 Fried Eggs with Brown Butter Eggs & Omelets No. 2872 Fried Eggs with Ham or Bacon →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two eggs, butter, salt, parsley — the whole point is technique, and Ranhofer assumes you already have most of it. A few of his assumptions need spelling out.

Clarified butter is the hingeWhole butter browns and speckles at frying temperature; clarified butter has the milk solids removed and stays clean and pale. Use it here, or the eggs pick up the brown flecks that belong to the previous recipe, No. 2870, fried eggs with brown butter.
"Fry slowly" means low heatFrench fried eggs are cooked gently so the white sets opaque and tender without blistering or browning at the edge. Medium-low on a modern burner; if the white bubbles or lace forms, the pan is too hot.
Break the eggs onto a plate firstThis is not fussiness. It lets you check the egg, catch shell, and slide both in together so they set at the same rate — hard to do cracking straight into hot fat.
Season before, not afterRanhofer salts the eggs on the plate. Salt sprinkled on a set white sits on the surface; salting the raw egg before it goes into the pan seasons it more evenly, though salt will slightly loosen the white.
"Very fresh eggs"Older whites spread thin and wide in the pan. A fresh egg holds a compact, domed shape, which is what makes this presentation work. Supermarket eggs several weeks old will still taste fine but will not hold.
The parsleyChopped fine and chopped at the last moment; Ranhofer does not say which parsley. He means it raw and green over the hot egg, not cooked in the butter.
YieldTwo eggs, presumably one serving; Ranhofer does not say. Scale by the pan, not the batch — two eggs to a small pan is the whole design.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he wrote after some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York. The book runs to well over three thousand numbered recipes, arranged so that variations sit in sequence: No. 2870 is fried eggs with brown butter, No. 2871 this one, No. 2872 with ham or bacon. That structure is often said to descend from the French codifying tradition of Carême and Gouffé, where a base preparation is stated once and then rung through its garnishes, each with its own name, though the lineage is an interpretation rather than a documented one. The name here is simply descriptive — œufs frits au persil haché, fried eggs with chopped parsley — and the entry's brevity may reflect an address to readers who needed the specification, not the lesson, though the book was explicitly offered to amateurs and housekeepers as well as professional cooks.