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Eggs Cocotte, Madeira
Place one and a half gills demi-glace in a saucepan with two tablespoons good sherry and boil for five minutes. Divide the sauce into six cocotte egg dishes, crack two fresh eggs into each dish, evenly season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper; place on a tin and set to bake in the oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
A straightforward French egg dish that depends entirely on two things the original assumes you have: real demi-glace and small ovenproof pots. Everything else is timing.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills is 3/4 cup of demi-glace — about 2 tablespoons per dish. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the pepper half a teaspoon total across twelve eggs.
- Madeira or sherryThe title says Madeira and the text says sherry; the heading and the ingredient do not match here. Either works, but use a dry Sercial or Verdelho Madeira, or a fino or amontillado sherry — nothing sweet or labelled "cooking wine."
- Demi-glaceThis means veal or beef stock reduced with espagnole to a glossy, lightly syrupy sauce, not gravy from a packet. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace concentrate is the practical substitute; if you dilute a concentrate, keep it thick enough to coat a spoon, since boiling with the wine will loosen it.
- Cocotte dishesSmall individual ovenproof pots — 4 to 6 oz ramekins are the right size for two eggs plus sauce. Butter them, and set them on a baking sheet as directed so they are easy to move.
- No oven temperature givenThe book leaves it out. For eggs en cocotte, 375-400F is the usual range; hotter and the whites toughen before the yolks warm through.
- Five minutes is optimisticEven with the sauce boiling hot from the pan, two eggs in a cold ramekin are unlikely to set in five minutes at a moderate oven temperature. Expect 8-12 minutes in a dry oven, or 12-15 in a water bath, and judge by the whites: barely opaque and just trembling, yolks still liquid.
- The water bath is worth itStanding the dishes in a roasting pan with hot water halfway up gives you a custardy white instead of a rubbery one, and buys you a wider margin of error. The original's "set on a tin" is the faster, less forgiving method.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each — a first course for six, or a light supper for four with bread. The eggs will be soft-set, so serve immediately with toast for the yolks.
Oeufs en cocotte — eggs baked in a small individual pot — belongs to the classic French repertoire that American hotel and restaurant kitchens adopted wholesale in the late nineteenth century, and this book gives a run of them distinguished only by the sauce and wine underneath. That pattern is itself a period signature. Where a kitchen had a base sauce on hand, dishes could be spun off it by adding a splash of something, and cookbooks of the era list them as separate recipes rather than as variations. The International Cook Book is generally attributed to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its brisk, portion-counted instructions read like notes from a professional kitchen rather than advice to a home cook — hence the six dishes, the exact salt, and the confident five minutes.</paragraph>