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Eggs Cocotte, Champetre
Slit on both sides twelve good-sized Italian chestnuts, place in a roasting pan, roast for twenty-five minutes, remove, shell and peel, place in a saucepan with enough cold milk to cover them, season with two saltspoons salt, one saltspoon cayenne, lightly mix and cook for twenty-five minutes. Remove, press them through a sieve into another small saucepan, add a gill cream and tablespoon sherry, mix well and boil for five minutes. Evenly pour this preparation in six egg-cocotte dishes, crack two fresh eggs in each dish, evenly season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, place cocotte on a tin, set in oven for six minutes, remove and serve.
A chestnut purée spooned into ramekins under baked eggs — straightforward once the archaic measures and the missing oven temperatures are filled in.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the purée takes about 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon cayenne. A gill is half a cup of cream.
- Oven for the chestnutsRoast the slit chestnuts at 425F for the twenty-five minutes given. Cut through the shell and the inner brown skin on both sides or they burst, and peel them while still hot — the skin welds on as they cool.
- Italian chestnutsLarge imported chestnuts, probably of the marroni type still sold in autumn. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts work: skip the roasting and simmer them straight in the milk.
- SievingA drum sieve or a food mill gives the texture the recipe wants. A blender or processor will make chestnut paste gluey rather than light.
- The purée must be hotThe eggs get only a few minutes of heat, so the chestnut base has to go into the dishes straight off the boil. Cold purée in the bottom means raw white on top.
- Cocotte timingSix minutes is likely too short for two eggs per dish in a home oven. At 375F, standing the ramekins in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up, allow 12-16 minutes for set whites and soft yolks.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper divided across six dishes is right for the eggs; season the surface, not the yolks, so pepper does not sit in one spot.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each — a first course for six, or a lunch dish for three or four.
Eggs en cocotte are eggs baked in small individual dishes, a French service style generally traced to restaurant and hotel kitchens of the later nineteenth century, when a course of two eggs in a personal vessel is often said to have been an early item on a long menu. The tag champêtre means rustic or of the fields, and here it points to the chestnut: in Italy and southern France chestnuts were a peasant staple, milled for flour and boiled for purée long before they became a luxury of autumn markets. The pairing of a sieved chestnut base with cream and a spoonful of sherry is characteristic of the grand-hotel manner this book records, where a country ingredient is given a garnish name and dressed up for the dining room.