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Eggs, Cocotte, Mrs. Bigelow
Finely chop a small truffle, place in a small saucepan with a gill demiglace and tablespoon sherry, boil five minutes, then pour sauce into six cocotte-egg dishes evenly divided. Crack two fresh eggs into each dish. Finely chop or grate one ounce cooked ham, sprinkle over eggs with half a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, pour tablespoon sweet cream over eggs of each dish, lay cocottes on a tin then set in oven five minutes. Remove and serve.
A set of six baked egg dishes, each holding two eggs over truffled sauce. The whole thing hinges on very short, gentle heat, and the original gives no oven temperature at all.
- GillA gill is half a cup, so 4 fl oz of demi-glace divided among six dishes — a scant tablespoon and a half apiece. Enough to film the bottom, not to poach the eggs.
- Cocotte-egg dishesSmall straight-sided porcelain ramekins or individual cast-iron cocottes, large enough to hold two eggs with the sauce and cream. The "tin" is simply a sheet pan to move six of them at once; a water bath is not called for here, though standing them in a pan of hot water gives more even, custardy whites.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is about half a teaspoon of white pepper. Both the salt and the pepper are for all six dishes together, not each.
- Oven heatNone is stated. Baked eggs of this kind are done in a moderate to moderately hot oven, 350-375F; five minutes at that heat sets the whites only barely, and 8-12 minutes is more realistic for whites that are just firm with liquid yolks.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown stock-based sauce, sometimes finished with Madeira or sherry, and the one component you cannot fake with a stock cube without the dish tasting of salt. Good jarred demi-glace concentrate works; thin it to sauce consistency before measuring the gill.
- TruffleA "small truffle" here is presumably black truffle, fresh or preserved, chopped and briefly cooked in the sauce so its aroma carries. Preserved truffle peelings are the practical substitute; truffle oil stirred in off the heat is a different flavour altogether and should be used sparingly if at all.
- Doneness and the yolksThe eggs are meant to come out with set whites and unset yolks. If that matters for anyone at the table, use pasteurised shell eggs or bake until the yolks are firm, accepting that the whites will tighten.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each, intended as a first course or a lunch dish. The ounce of ham spread over twelve eggs is seasoning rather than substance.
Oeufs en cocotte — eggs baked in individual pots — belong to the French restaurant repertoire of the late nineteenth century, where they gave a kitchen a way to serve eggs to order in the vessel they were cooked in. This version's foundation of demi-glace and truffle places it squarely in that professional idiom rather than in home cookery: it assumes a stockpot already running. The dedication to "Mrs. Bigelow" reflects what is often said to be the habit of the book's author, Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, of naming dishes for the patrons who ordered or were served them; the International Cook Book is full of such attributions, and they function less as authorship than as a guest list for a vanished dining room.