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Eggs, Belle Helene
Boil twelve fresh eggs five minutes, take them up and plunge in cold water one minute; remove and shell them. Clip off a small piece at the thick end of each. Cut from sandwich bread twelve pieces one and a half inches in diameter and quarter-inch thick; toast them to a nice golden colour, then carefully spread a half teaspoon caviare on the toast and place them on a dish; arrange the eggs on the toast standing up. Cut a small truffle in twelve star-shaped pieces and arrange one piece on top of each egg. Pour a cream sauce around the eggs and serve.
A cold-buffet showpiece from the era when a dish was judged on how it stood up on the plate. The construction is simple; the difficulty is entirely in the egg.
- The hinge: shelling a five-minute eggFive minutes gives a set white and a still-soft yolk, and that white tears easily. Use eggs at least a week old, plunge them straight into ice water rather than merely cold, and peel under running water. Six to seven minutes gives a firmer, more forgiving egg if you would rather not lose half of them.
- Standing the eggs upClipping the fat end is what lets the egg sit upright, and it needs to be a clean flat cut with a thin sharp knife, not a slice. Do it after peeling and once the eggs have cooled; the recipe's one-minute plunge leaves them still warm, and a soft yolk will run.
- Cream sauceNo recipe is given; a standard white sauce serves: a white roux of 2 tbsp butter and 2 tbsp flour, 1 cup milk or light cream, salt, white pepper, cooked out for several minutes so it does not taste of flour. Pour it around the base, not over the eggs, or the caviare and truffle disappear.
- CaviareA half teaspoon per round is about 1 oz total for the dish. Anything roe-based works structurally, but a firm-grained roe holds its shape against the sauce better than a soft pressed one.
- Truffle starsCut from a black winter truffle with the smallest aspic or petit-four cutter you have; a truffle of decent size should yield twelve thin stars. Preserved truffle peelings will not hold a cut shape. Blanched black olive rings are the honest substitute if truffle is out of reach.
- Toast roundsA 1½-inch cutter, bread sliced a scant ¼ inch. Toast, then cool completely before spreading — warm toast steams into the caviare.
- YieldTwelve eggs, one per serving as a first course, or two apiece for six at a light supper.
The name follows a nineteenth-century fashion for attaching operatic and theatrical titles to garnishes: Belle Hélène is generally traced to Offenbach's operetta La Belle Hélène of 1864, which also lent its name to the far better-known poached pear with chocolate sauce. There was no fixed formula behind such labels — a chef borrowed a famous name and the particular combination of caviare, truffle and cream sauce here belongs to whoever first sent it out. What the dish does show is how a grand-hotel kitchen of the 1900s thought about eggs: not as breakfast but as a platform, boiled to a precise five minutes so the yolk stayed soft, trimmed to stand at attention, and finished with the two ingredients — sturgeon roe and black truffle — that signalled expense at a glance. The International Cook Book (1906), written by Alexander Filippini, collected exactly this sort of hotel-repertoire dish alongside plain household cooking, on the assumption that an American cook might one day be asked for either.