No. 2917

Eggs on a Dish, Omer Pacha

Œufs sur le Plat a la Omer Pacha

Melt a little butter on a dish that can go in the oven; when heated break in twelve eggs, one beside the other, keeping the yolks whole; cook in a moderate oven for five to six minutes. Fry in butter two ounces of chopped onions and as much cut-up green peppers, add three gills of tomato sauce (No. 49) and half the quantity of half-glaze sauce (No. 413) and white wine; reduce, not having it too thick, then add bacon prepared by mincing unsmoked bacon; fry it in butter, moisten with gravy (No. 404) and Madeira wine, then cook and reduce the moistening entirely; pour this prepared sauce over the eggs or else serve in a separate sauce boat.

← No. 2916 Eggs on a Dish, Monaco Eggs & Omelets No. 2918 Eggs on a Dish, Plumerey →

For the Modern Kitchen

A garnished version of œufs sur le plat: eggs baked flat in butter, finished with a sweet-pepper and tomato sauce enriched with diced bacon. The sauce is the work; the eggs take minutes.

Do the sauce firstBoth sauce elements have to be reduced before a single egg goes into the dish. Eggs cooked sur le plat hold well for perhaps two minutes; have the sauce hot and ready in the pan.
GillsA gill is half a cup, so three gills of tomato sauce is 1 1/2 cups. "Half the quantity" gives 3/4 cup, though the phrase is ambiguous as to whether that 3/4 cup is half-glaze alone or half-glaze and white wine together. Either way the wine is a small addition, reduced out with the sauces.
Half-glaze and gravyRanhofer's half-glaze (No. 413) is demi-glace, a brown sauce reduced down; his gravy (No. 404) is a strong brown meat stock. Good commercial demi-glace and a well-reduced brown stock stand in without embarrassment. (The Madeira in this dish comes in separately, with the bacon.)
Unsmoked baconHe means green bacon or fresh-cured pork belly, not the smoked breakfast product, which would dominate the tomato and pepper. Pancetta is the closest thing in most shops; blanch salt pork briefly if that is what you have.
A moderate ovenRead as roughly 325-350F. A shallow enameled or earthenware gratin dish is right; set it over low heat on the stovetop until the butter is hot and the whites begin to grip before it goes in, or the bottoms stay slack.
Five to six minutesThat will only hold if the dish is already hot and the eggs are not straight from the refrigerator. Judge by sight: whites opaque and just set, yolks still liquid. Twelve eggs in one dish will not cook evenly unless the dish is genuinely wide, so use two.
Sauce over or besidePoured over, the hot sauce goes on cooking the yolks and hides them. The sauce boat he offers as an alternative is the better choice if you want the yolks soft, and it also keeps the whites from weeping into the sauce.
YieldTwelve eggs serves four to six as a lunch or supper dish, with bread. Season the eggs themselves lightly, since the reduced sauce carries most of the salt.

A Little History

Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) is a Delmonico's kitchen manual, and its many numbered egg dishes are distinguished almost entirely by garnish, each attached to a name from the dining room, the theatre or the newspapers. Omer Pasha was Omer Lütfi Pasha, the Ottoman commander whose defense of the Danube made him a celebrity in the Western press during the Crimean War of the 1850s; French cooks of that generation are said to have hung his name on preparations, and dishes so labeled seem, as here, to involve peppers and tomatoes, then read as Turkish or Eastern flavors. The convention was loose rather than documented: a garnish became "à la Omer Pacha" because a chef said so, and the attribution outlived any memory of the man. What the recipe shows more reliably is how a nineteenth-century professional kitchen worked, drawing on standing preparations, tomato sauce and half-glaze and brown gravy already to hand, so that an elaborate-sounding dish was a few minutes' assembly at service.