No. 2918

Eggs on a Dish, Plumerey

Œufs sur le Plat a la Plumerey

Remove the whites from four eggs, keeping the yolks in their shells; mix with these whites half a gill of soubise (No. 723) and half a gill of tomato puree (No. 730); butter a dish plentifully and pour into it the white of eggs, soubise and tomato mixture. Lay the yolks over and cook in a slack oven, bestrewing the top with raw fine herbs. Between each yolk place a round croquette an inch in diameter, made of grated cooked ham mixed with bechamel sauce (No. 409).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A baked egg dish built on two mother-sauce derivatives, so most of the work happens before the eggs are touched. Ranhofer's cross-references assume you have soubise, tomato purée and béchamel already made or can make them in small quantities.

Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (4 tablespoons). You need 1/4 cup soubise and 1/4 cup tomato purée in total, folded into the four raw whites.
SoubiseClassically an onion purée rather than the modern onion-and-rice version alone: onions blanched and stewed soft, puréed, and usually bound with béchamel. Any smooth, thick onion-béchamel purée will do here; it should mound on a spoon, not run.
Tomato puréeIn 1894 this meant fresh tomatoes cooked down and sieved, closer to a light passata than to canned tomato paste. If you use paste, thin it, or the whites will bake dry and acidic.
A slack ovenThe coolest working oven, conventionally reckoned somewhere around 250-300F. The point is to set the whites without letting the yolks tighten or the sauce break; too much heat and the mixture curdles and weeps.
Keeping the yolks wholeThe hinge of the dish. Crack each egg over a bowl and let the white slip away while the yolk stays in the half shell, then tip the yolks onto the surface only after the white-and-sauce mixture is in the buttered dish. A broken yolk bleeds into the pink sauce and the dish loses its whole effect.
Raw fine herbsFines herbes: chervil, chives, tarragon and parsley, chopped fine and scattered uncooked over the top before baking. Parsley and chives alone are a reasonable substitute if chervil is unavailable.
The ham croquettesCooked ham grated fine and bound with béchamel stiff enough to roll; chill the mixture before shaping the one-inch balls or they will slump in the oven. Four croquettes, one between each pair of yolks.
Doneness and yieldBake until the whites are just set and the yolks still soft, roughly 15-20 minutes at that low heat depending on the depth of the dish. Four eggs on one dish serves two as a lunch course, or four as part of a longer menu.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's, filled The Epicurean (1894) with dishes named after the cooks, patrons and public figures of the nineteenth century, and this one salutes Plumerey, the French chef generally remembered for completing the last two volumes of Carême's L'Art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle after Carême's death. The naming convention tells you as much as the recipe does: œufs sur le plat was a plain, almost domestic preparation, and the way to elevate it in a grand kitchen was to give it a garnish sufficiently distinctive to carry a name -- here the separated yolks sitting on a pink soubise-and-tomato bed, ringed with ham croquettes. Ranhofer's numbering system, sending the reader off to No. 723 and No. 409, reflects a professional brigade in which the sauces were already standing ready and the cook at the egg station simply drew on them.