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Eggs Cocotte, Fleur De Lys
Thoroughly wash a small stalk of tender celery and mince it exceedingly fine. Mix in saucpan a tablespoon butter with teaspoon flour, moisten with one and a half gills milk and mix until it comes to a boil. Add the celery with three saltspoons salt, saltspoon cayenne and saltspoon grated nutmeg, then boil for twenty-five minutes, pour in three-fourths gill cream, lightly mix, then strain the sauce through Chinese strainer in six egg-cocotte dishes, crack two fresh eggs in each dish, season with half teaspoon salt, place them on a tin, set in the oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
A celery-scented béchamel poured into ramekins, topped with eggs and baked. The whole thing hinges on the sauce being strained smooth and the eggs being pulled while the yolks are still soft.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of milk is 3/4 cup and three-fourths gill of cream is 6 tablespoons. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the seasoning 3/4 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon cayenne and 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg.
- Twenty-five minutes of boilingThree-quarters of a cup of milk thickened with a teaspoon of flour will scorch long before that at a true boil. Hold it at the barest simmer, stir often, and expect to add milk back as it reduces; the point is to infuse the celery, not to make glue.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. The minced celery is discarded here and only its flavour stays in the sauce, so mincing it fine matters less than giving it the full simmer.
- Oven heatFilippini gives none. Use 350-375F, and set the tin of ramekins in a water bath reaching halfway up their sides so the sauce beneath the eggs does not break or curdle at the edges.
- Five minutes is not enoughTwo eggs in a cold ramekin over cool sauce will barely move in five minutes. Reckon on 10-14 minutes covered, until the whites are just set and the yolks still liquid; carryover heat will finish them on the way to the table. Warming the sauce and the dishes first shortens this considerably.
- Salt twice overThe sauce already carries 3/4 teaspoon salt, and the recipe then calls for another half teaspoon at the eggs; it is not clear whether that is per dish or for all six. Read per dish it is heavy by modern palates. A pinch of flaky salt on each pair of eggs is a safer amount.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each: six generous first courses, or six light suppers with toast.
Cooking eggs en cocotte means baking them in a small individual dish, usually over a spoonful of cream or sauce, and it belongs to the same French service tradition. Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, filled The International Cook Book with dozens of such variations, each distinguished by whatever went into the bottom of the dish and each given a proper name in the manner of a printed menu. Fleur de lys, traditionally read as a stylised lily of French heraldry though the flower it depicts is commonly identified as an iris, is one of those decorative garnish names rather than a description of the dish; the same book uses royal, national and hotel names in exactly this way. What the recipe actually records is a small, careful piece of restaurant technique: a béchamel infused with celery, strained to invisibility, and used as a flavoured bed so the egg itself needs no further dressing.