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Eggs, Boxshall
Cut a small, peeled eggplant into six equal slices and trim each slice into round pieces two inches in diameter. Season all over with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, arrange on a lightly buttered tin, baste with a little melted butter, then set in oven for fifteen minutes. Arrange on hot dish, dress a poached egg over each eggplant, pour a soubise sauce over them and serve.
A composed egg dish of the Delmonico school: three elements, each simple, timed so they meet hot on the plate. The soubise is the part that needs planning, since the recipe assumes you have some standing by.
- Make the soubise firstSoubise is a white onion sauce — onions sweated in butter without colour until wholly soft, then either pureed into béchamel or cooked with rice and sieved. It takes 30 to 40 minutes and reheats well, so it should be finished and held warm before the eggplant goes into the oven.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 375°F, for the stated fifteen minutes suits thin rounds; thicker slices need 20 to 25 minutes or a turn under the broiler at the end.
- Cut thick, not thinThe recipe gives no thickness; six slices from one small eggplant implies substantial rounds. Cut thinner and they collapse under the egg and sauce; the slice is the plate here.
- The salt is for the cook to judgeA full teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper on six small rounds is heavy by present taste. Half that, applied 20 minutes ahead so it draws moisture, gives better browning and a more edible result.
- Butter generouslyEggplant takes up fat readily. A lightly buttered tin plus a light basting can leave the rounds dry and leathery at the edges; brush both faces well before they go in.
- Poach to orderPoach the eggs while the eggplant bakes, in barely trembling water with a spoon of vinegar, three minutes for a set white and liquid yolk. Trim the ragged skirts so each egg sits neatly on its round.
- YieldSix rounds, so three servings as a lunch or supper dish, or six as a first course. Warm the platter — eggplant and poached egg both cool fast under a sauce.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is full of dishes carrying surnames. Such titles are traditionally explained as tributes to favoured customers: a cook improvised something, wrote the name against it in the book, and the name outlived every memory of the man — though in this case the explanation is tradition rather than documented. The sauce is the older and better-documented part. Soubise, an onion puree bound with béchamel or with rice, is generally traced to the household of Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, an eighteenth-century French marshal whose kitchen produced several dishes bearing his title, though the attribution is traditional rather than proven. Its appearance over baked eggplant and a poached egg is characteristic of Filippini's method throughout the book: a vegetable base, an egg, and a classical French sauce, assembled from parts a professional kitchen already had on hand at any hour of service.