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Eggs, Aigredoux
Cut six small, Spanish sweet peppers in small squares, place in saucepan with a half teaspoon finely chopped tarragon, half teaspoon chopped chervil and half gill good vinegar, cover pan and let reduce five minutes. Pour in one and a half gills demi-glace and a tablespoon sherry, lightly mix, re-cover pan and let boil six minutes longer. Pour sauce into a large baking dish and carefully crack twelve fresh eggs over it, evenly season with a half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper, pour a tablespoon melted butter over, set in hot oven six minutes, then remove and serve.
A restaurant-style baked egg dish that depends entirely on having demi-glace on hand. The measurements are in gills and saltspoons, and the oven time is written for a commercial range.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so a half gill of vinegar is 1/4 cup and one and a half gills of demi-glace is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making three saltspoons of white pepper about 3/4 teaspoon.
- Demi-glace is the whole dishThere is no substitute that behaves the same way: this is brown veal or beef stock reduced with espagnole until it coats a spoon. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate diluted to a syrupy consistency works; plain stock will thin out and weep under the eggs.
- Spanish sweet peppersRead this as fresh sweet red pimiento-type peppers, small and thin-walled, not bell peppers and not hot. Jarred piquillo or pimiento peppers, drained and diced, are the closest thing on a modern shelf and need no reduction time of their own.
- "Hot oven"Take that as 425-450F. The pan and sauce should go in already simmering hot so the whites begin to set the moment the eggs land.
- Six minutes is shortAt six minutes in a large dish the whites will still be loose. Expect 8-12 minutes for whites fully set with soft yolks, judged by sight rather than the clock, and pull the dish while the centres still tremble since the hot sauce keeps cooking them.
- Crowding the dishTwelve eggs need a wide baking dish, roughly 9 by 13 inches, so each yolk sits in its own shallow pool. Piled in a smaller dish the whites merge and the bottoms overcook before the tops set.
- Chervil and tarragonBoth are used fresh here. Dried chervil has almost no flavour left; if you cannot find it fresh, increase the tarragon slightly and add a little parsley rather than substituting dried chervil.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, with bread to take up the sauce. It does not reheat.
Aigre-doux is French for sour-sweet, and it marks the sauce rather than the eggs: vinegar and herbs sharpened, then rounded off with reduced brown sauce and sherry. A vinegar reduction cut with demi-glace is broadly the same skeleton found in sauces such as piquante, and the treatment of eggs as a vehicle for a finished sauce, baked sur le plat and sent out in the dish, is the kind of thing associated with professional kitchens of the period. The recipe assumes a reader with demi-glace already made and a stockpot going, and that assumption, more than any ingredient, is what dates it.