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Eggs Cocotte, Hackett
Open a small can pate de foie gras, dip a tablespoon in lukewarm water, then scoop out three tablespoons of the pate, discard all fat, then press through a sieve into a bowl and dilute with a gill and half good cream. Season with two saltspoons salt, half saltspoon cayenne and half saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well, then divide evenly in six eggcocotte dishes. Crack two fresh eggs into each dish. Evenly season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, place on a tin, then place in oven five minutes. Remove; finely chop one small truffle, place in a small frying pan with two tablespoons sherry, boil five minutes, then divide over the eggs in the six dishes and serve.
A rich baked-egg dish that depends on gentle heat and restraint with the salt. The original gives no oven temperature and a cooking time that will not set twelve eggs.
- The hinge: low heat and a water bathFoie gras cream and egg curdle at the same temperature the eggs set. Stand the dishes in a roasting tin with hot water halfway up their sides and bake at 325F; the tin the recipe calls for is doing that job badly.
- Five minutes is not enoughTwo eggs in a ramekin need roughly 12-15 minutes at 325F in a bain-marie, until the whites are just opaque and the yolks still loose. They carry over off the heat, so pull them while they look slightly underdone.
- A gill and a halfA gill is half a cup, so this is 3/4 cup of cream for six dishes -- with the three tablespoons of pate, roughly two and a half tablespoons of foie gras cream under each pair of eggs.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. As written the dish takes about a teaspoon of salt in total on top of the pate, which is already heavily salted; halve it and season the finished eggs at the table.
- Pate de foie gras todayA tin labelled mousse or parfait is already smooth and enriched, so the sieving step is unnecessary -- just whisk it into the cream. Whole-lobe terrine or bloc still benefits from being pushed through a sieve. Discarding the fat cap, as the recipe says, matters: it will pool and split under the eggs.
- Truffle and sherryBoiling two tablespoons of sherry for five minutes leaves almost nothing in the pan and cooks the aroma out of the truffle. Warm the chopped truffle in the sherry for under a minute, off any real boil, and spoon it over.
- The dishesAn egg cocotte is a small straight-sided porcelain ramekin, typically on the small side, often around 4-5 oz. Two eggs will overfill that size; use 6 oz ramekins, buttered, or serve one egg each.
- YieldSix dishes, twelve eggs -- a first course for six, with toast fingers for the yolks.
Oeufs en cocotte take their name from the cocotte, the small individual casserole they are baked and served in, and the technique belongs to the French restaurant repertoire, where a garnish in the bottom of the dish -- cream, mushroom duxelles, foie gras, truffle -- did the work of a sauce. The suffix on the title is of a piece with the naming habits of grand hotel and club kitchens, whose books attach personal names to hundreds of dishes; who the individuals were is now generally unrecoverable. What the combination tells you plainly is the price bracket: tinned foie gras and fresh truffle in a two-egg supper dish places this in the expensive American dining room, where both were imported luxuries.