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Egg Cocotte, Espagnole
Prepare a Creole sauce, and divide it into six cocotte dishes evenly. Carefully crack two fresh eggs into each dish. Season with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, evenly divided over the eggs in the six dishes. Evenly spread two tablespoons hot tomato sauce over them, place on a tin and set in oven for five minutes. Remove and serve.
A straightforward baked-egg dish whose success depends entirely on pulling it before the yolks set. The original assumes you already have Creole sauce and cocotte dishes on hand, and it names no oven temperature.
- Cocotte dishesSmall individual ovenproof dishes of about 4 to 6 ounces — modern ramekins are the direct equivalent. Two eggs is a tight fit in a 4-ounce ramekin; use 6-ounce ones if you have them.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. For eggs of this kind a hot but not fierce oven, around 400F, is right; the goal is set whites and liquid yolks.
- Five minutes is optimisticFive minutes is likely short. The recipe does call for hot tomato sauce, and if the Creole sauce and the dishes go in hot as well, the time is less absurd than it looks; but with fridge-cold eggs expect appreciably longer. Judge by the whites: opaque at the edge, barely trembling at the centre.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is a half teaspoon spread across twelve eggs.
- Creole sauceIf the book gives its own version elsewhere, follow that. Otherwise any thick, well-reduced tomato-and-pepper sauce works; a thin one will weep under the eggs and leave them watery.
- The tomato sauce on topTwo tablespoons total, divided among six dishes, is a teaspoon each — a glaze rather than a blanket. Spoon it over hot and around the yolks rather than on them.
- The tinSetting the dishes on a tin is for handling, not insulation. If your oven runs hot from below, a shallow pan with an inch of hot water gives gentler, more even setting.
- YieldSix servings of two eggs each — a substantial breakfast or light supper course. Serve at once, in the dishes, with bread; the eggs continue cooking in the residual heat.
"Espagnole" here does not mean the brown mother sauce but simply Spanish-style, a nineteenth-century restaurant shorthand for anything built on tomato, onion and sweet pepper. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, set a Creole base and a Spanish label together without apology; both pointed at the same tomato-and-pepper flavour that American diners of the period read as southern, Latin or Iberian more or less interchangeably. Eggs en cocotte themselves are a French hotel technique, one that turns up often in the breakfast chapters of professional cookbooks from this era.