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Eggs Cocotte, Finnoise
Finely chop one sound, green pepper and brown in a frying pan with a tablespoon butter for five minutes, then pour in one and a half gills fresh red tomato juice, three saltspoons each salt and sugar, a half ounce butter and lightly mix; let boil for ten minutes, then evenly divide into six cocotte-egg dishes and crack two fresh eggs in each dish. Season all equally with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, place on a tin, set in the oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
A straightforward baked-egg dish whose only real difficulty is that the original gives neither an oven temperature nor a realistic time. Everything else converts cleanly.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of tomato juice is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making three saltspoons each of salt and sugar about 3/4 teaspoon apiece.
- Cocotte dishesThese are small straight-sided porcelain ramekins, roughly 4 to 6 oz each. Two eggs plus a spoonful of sauce needs at least a 6 oz dish or the whites will climb the rim.
- The ovenThe recipe gives no oven temperature at all. At a moderate oven (around 350F) two eggs in a cold-ish ramekin will need roughly 12 to 15 minutes for set whites and liquid yolks, not the five minutes given. Judge by the whites: opaque at the edge, barely trembling at the centre.
- A water bath helps"Place on a tin" is a bare sheet pan. Setting the ramekins in a roasting tin with an inch of hot water gives gentler, more even heat and is standard practice for oeufs en cocotte.
- Tomato juiceIn 1906 this meant juice pressed from fresh ripe tomatoes, thinner and sharper than the canned product. Canned juice works, but taste before adding the full 3/4 teaspoon of salt, since most brands are already salted.
- Reduce the sauce properlyTen minutes of boiling should leave a thick, spoonable pepper-tomato base, not a broth. Watery sauce under the eggs will separate and dilute the whites.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each, so six servings as a first course or light lunch dish.
Oeufs en cocotte are eggs baked in individual porcelain pots, a fixture of French service by the late nineteenth century and a convenient hotel dish because each portion could be assembled ahead and finished to order. The tag finnoise follows the classical French habit of naming a garnish for a place; it is often said that in Escoffier-era usage the geographical labels were loose, attached to a combination that struck a chef as suggestive of somewhere rather than derived from its cooking. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book from exactly this stock of hotel-kitchen preparations, and the sweetened tomato-and-green-pepper base here is very much of its moment: American peppers and tomatoes fitted into a French service format.