No. 2937

Scrambled Eggs a la Martinez

Œufs Brouilles a la Martinez

Broil four sweet Spanish peppers, selected with meaty and plump insides; suppress their skins by rubbing with a cloth, then divide each one in two; fry in butter and oil, half of each, season with salt, drain off the fat, and mix in a little meat glaze (No. 402) and chopped parsley. Scramble eight eggs, thickening over a slow fire, and when almost done mingle in some artichoke bottoms cut in quarter-inch squares, and fried in butter, and some cooked ham cut in three-sixteenths of an inch squares. Dress the whole in a vegetable dish, smooth the surface dome-shaped and pour around tomato sauce (No. 549) and half-glaze sauce (No. 413), mixed. Arrange the peppers in a circle, one overlapping the other, and serve the remainder of the sauce separately.

← No. 2936 Scrambled Eggs a la Jerome Eggs & Omelets No. 2938 Scrambled Eggs in a Risot Border with Ducks' →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a kitchen with stock reductions already on hand; the eggs themselves are simple, and everything else is assembly. Read the cross-referenced sauces as pantry items you will have to supply.

The hinge: low heat, off early"Thickening over a slow fire" means the lowest workable flame and constant stirring, and the additions go in while the eggs still look underdone. Ranhofer's scrambled eggs are a soft, small-curd custard, not the dry flakes of a diner griddle; residual heat finishes them in the serving dish.
Sweet Spanish peppersThese are thick-walled red peppers of the pimiento type, not chiles. Broil or char them whole until the skin blisters, rub it off with a cloth as directed, and use four; a jar of whole roasted piquillo or pimiento peppers substitutes cleanly and saves the charring.
Meat glaze (No. 402)Glace de viande: brown veal or beef stock reduced until it is syrupy and sets firm when cold. A tablespoon of commercial demi-glace concentrate, or your own stock reduced hard, gives the same effect — a little goes a long way and it is salty, so season the peppers lightly.
Half-glaze sauce (No. 413)Ranhofer's half-glaze is what modern kitchens call demi-glace: espagnole sauce finished with more brown stock and reduced by half. The recipe says only that it is "mixed" with the tomato sauce (No. 549) without giving proportions; the mixture becomes the moat poured around the eggs.
Artichoke bottomsThe fleshy base of a large globe artichoke, trimmed of leaves and choke. Frozen or jarred artichoke bottoms work; drain and dry them well before frying in butter, or they will weep into the eggs.
“Half of each”The peppers are fried in a mixture of equal parts butter and oil, then the fat is poured off before the glaze and parsley go in. Do not confuse this with frying half the peppers.
Dice sizesThree-sixteenths of an inch is about 5 mm for the ham; quarter-inch is about 6 mm for the artichoke. The point is that both are small enough to be suspended in the curds rather than sinking through them.
Yield and serviceEight eggs serve four as a lunch or supper course. Dome the eggs in a warmed shallow dish, ring the sauce around the base rather than over the top, and lay the pepper halves overlapping around the rim; the rest of the sauce goes to the table in a boat.

A Little History

This is Delmonico's cooking written down: Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen of the New York restaurant for more than thirty years and published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of its repertoire, some 3,500 numbered receipts cross-referencing one another as they would in a brigade kitchen. Nineteenth-century French kitchen naming often attached a patron's or a place's name to a fixed garnish; no Spanish original is documented for this one. What dates the recipe most is its economy of scale: artichoke bottoms, cooked ham, glace de viande and two finished brown sauces were the sort of preparations kept standing at the station, so a plate of scrambled eggs could absorb four separate preparations without anyone making a single one of them to order.