Home › The World's Kitchen › Egg Molet, Bermuda
Egg Molet, Bermuda
Finely slice two small Bermuda onions, place in a small saucepan with one ounce butter and fry ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile; add one ounce flour, stir well, then pour in two gills milk and one tablespoon sherry, add two finely sliced, peeled, raw potatoes. Season with half teaspoon salt two saltspoons pepper and mix well. Cover the pan and let cook thirty minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Press them through a sieve and arrange the puree on a hot dish. Plunge twelve fresh eggs in boiling water for five minutes, take up, drop in cold water, remove and shell them. Arrange them nicely over the puree and serve.
A soupe-à-l'oignon-adjacent onion and potato purée used as a bed for soft-boiled eggs. The measurements are Edwardian but straightforward; the timing on the eggs is the part that decides whether the dish works.
- The hinge: five minutes means five minutesMolet is mollet — the stage between soft- and hard-boiled, with a set white and a yolk that is still liquid at the centre. Lower the eggs into water already at a rolling boil, time them from that moment, and move them straight to cold water. A minute longer and you have hard-boiled eggs on purée, which is a different and duller dish.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of milk is one cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making two saltspoons half a teaspoon of pepper — assertive but correct for a bland onion base.
- Ounces of butter and flourOne ounce of butter is two tablespoons; one ounce of flour is a scant quarter cup. Together they make a small roux that thickens the cup of milk into a coating sauce.
- Bermuda onionsA large, flat, mild sweet onion, once shipped in quantity from Bermuda to the eastern United States. Any sweet onion — Vidalia, Walla Walla, a large sweet white — behaves the same way. Do not substitute a sharp yellow storage onion without expecting a harsher purée.
- Heat control during the thirty minutesOne cup of milk with sliced raw potato, covered for half an hour, will catch and scorch on a modern flat burner. Keep it at the barest simmer, stir more often than "occasionally," and add a splash of milk or water if it tightens before the potato is tender.
- Sieving the puréeUse a food mill or a potato ricer, or push it through a mesh sieve as written. Keep it out of a blender or food processor: the potato starch turns gluey in seconds.
- PeelingVery fresh eggs at five minutes are fragile and cling to their shells. Eggs a week or so old peel far more cleanly, and cracking them under cold running water helps.
- Yield and proportionTwelve eggs serves six as a light main course or lunch dish, but the purée as written — two small onions and two potatoes — is thin cover for twelve eggs. Double the vegetable base, or halve the eggs, unless you want little more than a smear beneath each one.
Œuf mollet is a standard of the French repertoire — the five- to six-minute egg, shelled and served warm on a purée, in a sauce, or in aspic — and this entry appears to anglicise the term while pinning the dish to its onion. Bermuda onions were a genuine commercial category in the period rather than a flourish: mild, flat, sweet onions grown for export and landed in New York in large volume through the late nineteenth century. A title of "Bermuda" in American and hotel cookbooks of the era often signals that onion. The construction here — sweat the onion in butter, bind with a roux, cook down with potato, sieve — is close to the method that produces a purée soubise, and the sherry is the sort of small enrichment found on hotel menus of the day.