No. 2919

Eggs on a Dish, Rossini

Œufs sur le Plat a la Rossini

Butter the bottom of a dish, break on it four eggs, being careful to keep the yolks whole. Fry some fat chicken livers cut in escalops that have been seasoned and rolled in flour; garnish around the eggs with these. Cook the eggs in a moderate oven, cover the livers with Perigueux sauce (No. 517) and serve.

← No. 2918 Eggs on a Dish, Plumerey Eggs & Omelets No. 2920 Eggs on a Dish, Venetian Style →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A two-egg-per-person baked egg dish that depends entirely on pulling it before the yolks set. Ranhofer assumes you already have Périgueux sauce on hand, which is the part that takes real work.

Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 325 to 350F. The eggs need only 8 to 10 minutes: whites just opaque, yolks still liquid. Carryover heat in a hot dish will keep cooking them after they leave the oven, so err early.
The dish itselfAn œuf sur le plat dish is a shallow, flat-bottomed, ovenproof plate, ideally one you can bring to the table. A small cast-iron or enameled gratin dish of six to seven inches works. Depth is the enemy here; the eggs should sit in a thin layer.
Keeping the yolks wholeBreak each egg into a cup first and slide it onto the buttered dish rather than cracking directly over it. Space the four so the whites touch but the yolks stay apart.
The livers"Escalops" means the livers trimmed and cut into flat slices. Season, flour, and fry them hard in butter for two to three minutes total, until browned outside and still pink at the center. The recipe breaks the eggs onto the buttered dish first and then arranges the fried livers around them before the dish goes into the oven; livers cooked through and then reheated in the oven turn grainy.
Périgueux saucePerigueux sauce in classic usage is a Madeira-fortified demi-glace finished with chopped truffle. Made from scratch it is a long job. A good reduced veal stock with Madeira and a little truffle or truffle paste is the practical stand-in; jarred demi-glace concentrate will do at a pinch.
SaltSalt the whites and the livers, not the yolks. Salt crystals dropped on a yolk before baking leave pale pitted spots on the surface.
Sauce placementSpoon the sauce over the livers only, as written. A dark sauce poured across the yolks both hides them and cools them.
YieldFour eggs on one dish serves two as a first course, or one at the sort of breakfast this book was written for. Serve with bread; there is nothing else on the plate.

A Little History

"À la Rossini" attaches the composer Gioachino Rossini's name to dishes built on truffle and liver, and the tag was applied liberally in nineteenth-century French kitchens long after Rossini himself had died in 1868 — the association with his appetite is traditional rather than something he ever set down in writing. The canonical Rossini garnish is foie gras with truffle; here Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's in New York, uses fat chicken livers instead. The sauce carries the other half of the pedigree: Périgueux is named for the town in the Dordogne at the center of the French black truffle trade, and in classic saucework it means a Madeira-based brown sauce studded with chopped truffle.