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Eggs Cocotte, Sarkey
Cut two ounces raw ham in exceedingly small pieces, place in small saucepan with a tablespoon melted butter and gently brown for four minutes; add half teaspoon curry powder, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, leaves from a branch chervil and three gills tomato sauce. Mix well, let reduce to half quantity and add little by little half an ounce butter, mixing while adding. Divide this sauce into six egg-cocotte dishes, crack two fresh eggs in each dish, evenly season eggs with a half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, pour a teaspoon cream over the eggs of each dish, place on a tin, set in oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
A French egg-cocotte dish given an Anglo-Indian turn with curry powder and ham. The whole thing hinges on the eggs, which the stated five minutes will not set.
- Three gills of tomato sauceA gill is half a cup, so three gills is 1½ cups, reduced down to about ¾ cup. That is roughly 2 tablespoons of sauce per dish, which is right for a base under two eggs.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of pepper across twelve eggs is half a teaspoon total, and the half teaspoon of salt is likewise for the whole batch, not per dish.
- Raw hamThis means uncooked cured ham — prosciutto, speck or a dry country ham — rather than fresh pork. Two ounces cut very fine will render and brown in the butter in the four minutes given.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated. Modern practice for baked eggs is somewhere around 350–400F. Filippini says only "place on a tin"; a tin of hot water reaching halfway up the dishes is a later refinement, not what he directs, though it does help keep the whites from toughening at the edges.
- The five minutes is wrongThe five minutes is short -- Twelve cold eggs in six ceramic dishes are unlikely to set in five minutes unless the oven is very hot and the sauce already warm; in a water bath expect nearer 10–14 minutes. Pull them when the whites are just opaque and the yolks still tremble, as the hot crockery goes on cooking them.
- Cocotte dishesRamekins of at least six ounces are needed, since each holds two eggs plus about 2 tablespoons of sauce and a teaspoon of cream. Butter them, and warm the tomato sauce base in them briefly before cracking the eggs in so the eggs are not sitting on cold sauce.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh. Flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves gives the closest approximation of its faint anise note; dried chervil contributes nothing.
- Mounting the butterThe half ounce (one tablespoon) of butter beaten in little by little off the boil is what gives the sauce its gloss and body. If it boils after the butter goes in, it will separate.
- YieldSix servings of two eggs each — a substantial breakfast or luncheon course. Serve with toast; the sauce at the bottom of each dish wants mopping.
Œufs en cocotte — eggs baked in individual dishes, usually over a spoonful of cream or sauce — belong to the French restaurant repertoire, the cocotte being the small lidded pot rather than any particular dish made in it. Alexander Filippini, generally described as a chef and manager at Delmonico's in New York, filled his books with dishes carrying proper names of this kind; the practice of christening a preparation after a regular customer, a colleague or a patron was standard in the grand restaurants of the period, and most such names have long since lost whatever person stood behind them. What makes this version of its moment is the curry powder: by the turn of the twentieth century a spoonful of commercial curry powder was a routine seasoning in American and British kitchens, dropped into sauces, soups and egg dishes with no pretension to Indian cookery, and here it sits quite comfortably beside chervil and tomato.