No. 2910

Eggs on a Dish, Bercy

Œufs sur le Plat a la Bercy

Fry in a pan two or three sausages; pour the fat into a small egg dish (Fig. 567), leaving the sausages in the pan, then break four eggs into the dish. Pour over some melted butter, salt over the whites and cook in the range oven, leaving them in till they are glossy. Skin the sausages, cut them up and dress around the eggs, serving with a half-glaze sauce (No. 413) and tomato sauce (No. 549), reduced together and strained through a fine sieve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A two-part dish: eggs baked in sausage fat and butter, ringed with the sliced sausage and sauced. Everything hinges on pulling the eggs while the yolks are still liquid.

"Glossy" is the doneness cueThe whites should be just set and the yolks still glazed over and soft; "glossy" is usually read as the yolk having filmed but not clouded. Ranhofer gives no oven temperature, only "the range oven," so any modern figure is a guess; watch the dish rather than the clock, since a little too long leaves the yolks chalky.
The egg dishAn œuf sur le plat dish is a shallow, flat-bottomed metal or earthenware dish, ovenproof and just wide enough for the eggs to sit in one layer. A small cast-iron skillet or an individual gratin dish does the same job. Heat it with the fat in it so the whites begin setting on contact.
Salt the whites onlyThe recipe is specific about this. Salt sprinkled on the yolk is commonly said to draw moisture and leave pale speckles on the surface, which would spoil the gloss the recipe is after.
SausagesThe recipe specifies only "two or three sausages"; small fresh links are the likely sense. Cook them through in the pan, since they are only warmed again as a garnish; "skin" means slipping off the casing before slicing into rounds.
Half-glaze sauceNo. 413 is demi-glace: brown veal or beef stock reduced with espagnole to a syrupy, coating consistency. A good reduced brown stock or a bought demi-glace will stand in; the point is a dark, glossy sauce to balance the tomato.
The sauce mixtureReducing the demi-glace and tomato sauce together and straining gives a smooth, fairly thick sauce. Spoon it around the eggs rather than over them, or it will hide the yolks and bleed into the whites.
YieldFour eggs in one dish serves two as a light course, or one as a substantial breakfast. Scale by dish, not by crowding more eggs into one.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years' cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and its egg chapter runs to many numbered œufs sur le plat, each distinguished only by its garnish and sauce. "Bercy" points to the district on the eastern edge of Paris that until the twentieth century held the city's great wine depots; the name attached to a family of dishes, though the link between the dishes and the quarter is traditional rather than documented. What the recipe shows most plainly is how a nineteenth-century restaurant kitchen worked: the eggs take four lines, because the two sauces they lean on are simply referenced by number, like parts from a catalogue.