Prepare a puree of sorrel garnishing (No. 728), finish it with a little half-glaze (No. 400), butter it well, and dress in a vegetable dish; smooth the surface, and on it arrange six soft eggs, prepared as explained in No. 2949. Baste the sorrel with half-glaze applied with a brush.
FARINACEOUS (Farineux).
A Delmonico's assembly rather than a recipe in the modern sense: Ranhofer expects you to have three other numbered preparations already in hand. Here is what those are and what the shorthand means.
Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially his working system set down in print — thousands of numbered entries that cross-reference each other the way a professional brigade actually worked, with the purées, the stocks and the glazes made once in quantity and drawn on all day. Sorrel purée belongs firmly to the French classical repertoire, where the leaf's sharp oxalic tang was valued as a foil to rich or bland foods: it is the classic bed for shad, for veal, and, as here, for eggs. The pairing of soft eggs with a sharp green purée is old and logical, the acidity cutting the yolk, and versions of it appear across nineteenth-century French cookbooks. That an American restaurant book of the 1890s assumes fresh sorrel is available says something about the market gardens then feeding Manhattan — it was a common kitchen-garden green, and has since largely dropped out of English-speaking cooking.