No. 652

Eggs with Cheese Garnishing

Garniture d'oeufs au Fromage

This garnishing is composed of two ounces of butter, six whole eggs, four ounces of Swiss and parmesan cheese, both grated, a pinch of sugar and nutmeg. Beat up the eggs for two minutes, add to them the cheese, sugar, nutmeg, and half of the butter; melt the remainder of the butter in a saucepan, pour into it the eggs, and stir the liquid over a slow fire using a spoon for this purpose, until the compound thickens to the consistency of cream. Take it off the fire, keep stirring it again for two minutes, then mix in with it two spoonfuls of raw cream or veloute (No. 415). Pour the melted cheese in some boat shaped tartlet crusts, made with very thin foundation paste; bake them in a hot oven and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is essentially a cheese-enriched soft scramble, cooked to a custardy cream and spooned into boat-shaped pastry shells (barquettes) as a garnish for a larger dish. The whole thing turns on temperature control at the stove.

The hinge: keep the heat low"Stir over a slow fire until the compound thickens to the consistency of cream" means a bare simmer under the pan, or a bowl set over hot water. The moment the eggs set into curds the garnish is finished; it should pour, not mound.
Why the off-heat stirring mattersThe two minutes of stirring after the pan leaves the fire is carryover cooking, not idle work: residual heat in the butter and pan will keep thickening the mixture. The cream or velouté goes in only after that stirring.
Butter and cheese quantitiesTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons; four ounces of grated cheese is about 1 1/2 cups loosely packed, split between Gruyère-type Swiss and Parmesan. Ranhofer does not say how to divide the four ounces — half and half is reasonable, with more Parmesan if you want it sharper.
"Two spoonfuls of raw cream"A spoonful here is generally taken to mean roughly a tablespoon, and "raw" means simply uncooked -- heavy cream straight from the container, as opposed to the cooked velouté alternative. Its job is to loosen the texture and cool the mixture down.
Velouté No. 415A white sauce of veal or chicken stock thickened with a flour-and-butter roux. If you are not working from the rest of the book, plain cream is the simpler and better choice here.
Hot ovenRanhofer gives no temperature; read "hot" loosely as somewhere around 400-450F. In practice the shells are better blind-baked empty at that heat until crisp and dry, then filled and given only a minute or two of oven heat to warm through; baking the egg mixture hard would scramble it.
Foundation paste, very thinA lean, unsweetened short pastry rolled thin and pressed into small boat molds. Modern miniature tartlet shells work; keep them small, since this is a garnish served alongside something else.
YieldSix eggs plus the cheese, butter and cream makes roughly two cups of filling, enough for a couple of dozen small barquettes depending on the size of the moulds. Fill and serve immediately; the mixture stiffens and weeps as it cools.

A Little History

This entry comes from the garnishings chapter of Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of his long tenure as chef at Delmonico's in New York. In classic French service a garniture was not a sprig on the plate but a constructed accessory with its own recipe and number, cross-referenced to sauces elsewhere in the book -- here to velouté No. 415 and, in sequence, to the Chambord and cheese-crust garnishings on either side. The filling is close to what older French writers called a fondue -- eggs, butter and grated cheese stirred smooth over gentle heat -- a sense of the word that predates the melted-cheese-and-wine dish, though Ranhofer does not use the term here and the dish's origins are not firmly documented. The choice of Gruyère-style Swiss with Parmesan, and the small pinch of sugar with nutmeg, is characteristic of the period's seasoning of cheese and egg mixtures.