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Eggs Cocotte, with Tomato Sauce
Pour two tablespoons tomato sauce in an egg cocotte dish. Carefully crack in two fresh eggs. Season with half saltspoon salt and one-quarter saltspoon white pepper. Spread a teaspoon cold cream over the eggs; then prepare five other cocottes the same as the first. Place them in a tin and set in the oven for six minutes. Remove and send to the table.
A six-portion breakfast dish that depends almost entirely on judging when the whites have set. The original assumes a coal range and a cook standing at the oven door, so treat the stated six minutes as a starting point rather than a rule.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Half a saltspoon of salt is roughly an eighth of a teaspoon per dish, and a quarter saltspoon of pepper is a pinch.
- Cocotte dishA small individual ramekin, on the order of 4 fl oz, straight-sided; in a deeper dish the whites will tend to set well before the yolks warm.
- "Cold cream"Plain unheated cream, not a cooked or thickened sauce.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and none can be inferred with confidence from the text. A moderate to moderately hot oven, around 350 to 375F, is a modern suggestion rather than the book's instruction.
- The tinThe "tin" is a baking pan or roasting tin used to hold the ramekins together. Adding an inch of hot water to it turns it into a bain-marie, which is the standard modern method and gives a far more even set.
- TimingSix minutes is short for most home ovens, particularly with a water bath. Expect 8 to 14 minutes, and pull them when the whites are just opaque and the yolks still tremble; they carry on cooking in the hot dish on the way to the table.
- Soft yolksThe yolks are meant to stay liquid, so the eggs never reach a pasteurising temperature. For anyone who should avoid undercooked egg, use pasteurised shell eggs or cook until the yolk is firm.
- Tomato sauce and yieldA plain, fairly thick tomato sauce works best; a thin one floods the dish and the eggs poach rather than bake. As written the recipe makes six cocottes, two eggs each, so twelve eggs in all.
Oeufs en cocotte are a fixture of French household and hotel cookery: eggs broken into a small individual dish, enriched with cream, and set in a gentle oven or a water bath rather than in a pan. The name comes from the vessel, the cocotte, a small lidded or straight-sided pot. Adding a spoonful of tomato sauce beneath the eggs is one of the standard variations found in such books, alongside versions with cheese, ham, chicken hash or mushrooms, all built on the same template. The dish suited breakfast and light luncheon menus because each portion could be assembled in its own dish and sent to the table in it.