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Eggs Cocotte, Justine
Place a gill demi-glace and a tablespoon Madeira in saucepan and let boil for five minutes. Pour in a half gill cream, mix well, add little by little a half ounce fresh butter, sharply mixing with whisk while adding it, and evenly divide sauce in six egg-cocotte dishes. Crack two fresh eggs in each dish, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper evenly divided, set in oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
A classic baked-egg dish whose only difficulty is that the original gives no oven temperature and a timing that assumes professional equipment. Everything else is straightforward once the units are translated.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so the sauce base is 1/2 cup demi-glace and 1/4 cup cream. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making two saltspoons 1/2 teaspoon of pepper spread across six dishes.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Use 375F. Hotter than that and the whites toughen at the edges before the centre sets.
- The timing is the weak pointFive minutes only works if the dishes and sauce go into the oven hot. From cool ramekins expect 8 to 12 minutes, and pull them when the whites are just opaque and the yolks still move; carryover heat finishes them at the table.
- Use a water bathThe book omits it, but set the cocottes in a roasting pan with hot water halfway up the sides. It is the difference between custardy eggs and rubbery ones, and it buys you a wider margin on the timing.
- Cocotte dishesSmall ceramic pots, often lidded; 6 oz ramekins are the modern equivalent. Two eggs plus sauce needs the full 6 oz, so do not crowd them into 4 oz dishes.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole sauce combined with brown stock and reduced down. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate is fine here; a thin canned beef broth is not, since the sauce depends on body to sit under the eggs rather than run through them.
- Mounting the butterAdd the butter off the boil, whisking in small pieces. If the sauce boils after the cream and butter go in, the emulsion breaks and you get a greasy film under the eggs.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each, so six servings as a first course or brunch plate. Serve with toast; the sauce is the point and there is not much of it per dish.
Oeufs en cocotte take their name from the small lidded earthenware pot, the cocotte, in which they are baked and served — the same word French cooks use for a casserole pot, scaled down to one portion. The dish belongs to the great age of hotel and restaurant egg cookery, when Escoffier-trained kitchens listed dozens of named garnishes for baked and shirred eggs, each one a spoonful of sauce or a dice of something rich beneath the egg. Names like "Justine" are the fossils of that system: they were shorthand on a professional menu, not stories, and most of them cannot now be traced to any particular person. What makes this version worth attention is the sauce, a demi-glace enriched with Madeira, cream and whisked-in butter — the labour of a stockpot standing on the range for a day, reduced to half a cup and divided among six little pots. The International Cook Book, compiled from restaurant practice for American home cooks, prints it with the brevity of a kitchen note, assuming the reader already has the demi-glace to hand.