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Eggs Cocotte, Bonne Femme
Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, add four finely chopped shallots, the scraped red part of a small carrot and fry five minutes, then add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, ten branches chopped chives, one finely peeled and chopped tomato, three tablespoons bread crumbs, one gill demi-glace, three saltspoons salt and saltspoon white pepper, mix well and let cook five minutes. Evenly divide preparation in six egg-cocotte dishes, crack two fresh eggs in each dish. Season evenly with half teaspoon of salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Cut one ounce lean salt pork in dice, brown in a frying pan with a teaspoon butter to nice golden colour, distribute it equally over the eggs, set in oven five minutes. Remove and serve.
A French egg dish that stands or falls on the timing: the eggs are meant to come out with set whites and liquid yolks, and five minutes in a hot oven with cold dishes will not get you there.
- The hinge: heat the dishes and use a water bathSet the filled cocottes in a roasting pan with hot water reaching halfway up their sides, and have the vegetable base still warm when the eggs go in. Cold ramekins straight into the oven give you either raw whites or, by the time the whites set, hard yolks.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Treat it as a moderate oven, 350F, and start checking at 8 minutes; whites should be just opaque and yolks still loose. Without a water bath in a hotter oven the bottoms overcook before the tops set.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of salt is 3/4 teaspoon. A gill is half a cup.
- Total saltBetween the seasoned base, the half teaspoon scattered over the eggs and an ounce of salt pork, this is heavily salted by current taste. Cut the salt over the eggs to a pinch per dish and adjust the base at the end.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thick enough to coat a spoon. Good jarred demi-glace or a strongly reduced beef stock works; a bouillon cube dissolved in water will not, since the point is body as much as flavour.
- Egg-cocotte dishesSmall straight-sided porcelain ramekins of about 4 to 6 ounces. Two eggs in a 4-ounce dish will overflow, so use 6-ounce dishes or drop to one egg each.
- Salt porkLean salt pork, diced and rendered, is the "bonne femme" element. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon or pancetta is the closest supermarket substitute; rinse salt pork if it is very heavily cured.
- YieldSix cocottes, twelve eggs: a first course for six, or lunch for four with bread. The vegetable base can be made ahead and rewarmed.
Oeufs en cocotte are eggs baked in individual dishes, usually in a water bath, and the form was standard in French restaurant and household cooking well before this book appeared. "Bonne femme" — literally "good wife" — is one of the old kitchen labels for a plain, homely garnish rather than a fixed formula: in practice it signals onions or shallots, herbs and a little pork or bacon, the things a domestic cook would have to hand. The version here, with its gill of demi-glace, shows the hybrid character of Alexander Filippini's International Cook Book: a peasant-named dish rebuilt on a professional stock base, written for American households that were being sold the idea of restaurant cooking at home. Filippini spent much of his career in the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, and the reliance on a standing pot of brown sauce is a habit from that world.