Put into a sautoir one gill of tomato juice and a spoonful of melted glaze (No. 402); add a small bunch of aromatic herbs and tarragon leaves, reduce the until it is the consistency of a syrup, then take out the herbs and pour the liquid into a large egg dish. Break six eggs in a dish, salt the whites, pour over some melted butter and cook in the oven until they become glossy.
A one-pan shirred-egg dish that lives or dies on the reduction underneath: the tomato and glaze must be thick enough to coat the bottom of the dish rather than pool around the whites.
Œufs sur le plat — eggs baked and served in the same shallow dish — fill several pages of Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of his decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York. The form is deliberately plain, so the variations are named for whatever sits beneath or beside the eggs: Fermière, Omer Pacha, Monaco. Names invoking Monaco in this period are often, though not always, attached to tomato preparations, and this one is a compact demonstration of how a nineteenth-century professional kitchen worked: a half cup of tomato juice becomes worth serving only because a spoonful of meat glaze, itself the product of hours of boiling stock down, is already standing by on the range. The whole preparation takes perhaps ten minutes once the larder work behind it is done.