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Eggs Cocotte
Chop very finely one medium-sized, sound onion, place it in a saucepan with a tablespoon melted butter and brown to a good golden colour. Add three tablespoons finely minced canned mushrooms, or the equivalent of fresh mushrooms if at hand, half teaspoon finely chopped chives, one tablespoon sherry wine, three tablespoons tomato sauce, three tablespoons demi-glace, half saltspoon cayenne pepper and two saltspoons salt. Mix well with the wooden spoon and then let slowly reduce to one-half. Have six clean and lightly buttered cocottiers (egg dishes), then divide the preparation evenly into the six cocotte dishes. Break two fresh eggs in each dish. Pour half teaspoon sweet cream over each dish, sprinkle a very little salt over each egg. Set in the hot oven to bake for five minutes. Remove from the oven and serve.
A professional-kitchen dish scaled for a household: a reduced mushroom-and-tomato base under baked eggs. Two points decide whether it works — the reduction must be thick enough not to weep, and the eggs need gentler heat than five minutes in a hot oven suggests.
- CocottiersThese are small individual porcelain or earthenware pots — ramekins of about 4 to 6 oz hold two eggs comfortably. Butter them and warm them before filling; a cold dish adds minutes to the bake and toughens the whites at the edges.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the cayenne is about 1/8 teaspoon and the salt about 1/2 teaspoon for the whole base, which is seasoning for six portions rather than for one.
- Demi-glaceBrown veal stock reduced with a little roux or further reduced on its own until it coats a spoon. Bought demi-glace concentrate works; a well-reduced homemade brown stock works better. If you have neither, reduce good beef stock hard until syrupy rather than substituting gravy.
- "Hot oven"In this period that generally means somewhere in the 400 to 450F range. At that heat two eggs in a ramekin are unlikely to be set in five minutes unless the dish and the sauce are already hot, and the whites nearest the wall will overcook before the centre catches up.
- Water bathThe standard treatment for eggs en cocotte is to set the dishes in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up their sides and bake at about 350F for 10 to 14 minutes, until the whites are just set and the yolks still loose. The original omits it, and the omission is why the timing reads short.
- Canned mushroomsPeriod canned mushrooms were firm, salty and already cooked. If using fresh, sauté them with the onion until their liquid has gone, or the base will not reduce properly.
- Reduce to one-halfYou want a spoonable, glossy mixture, not a sauce. Anything looser will pool under the eggs and separate in the oven, leaving a watery layer beneath a set white.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each: six generous first courses, or six lunch or supper plates with bread. The base can be made a day ahead and reheated before the eggs go in.
Oeufs en cocotte take their name from the vessel: a cocotte is a small covered pot, the diminutive relative of the cast-iron casserole, and individual porcelain ones were made for exactly this purpose. The dish belongs to the restaurant repertoire rather than the farmhouse one, and the giveaway is the demi-glace — a sauce that only exists where someone is already reducing veal stock all day. The recipes read as brigade practice written down for domestic readers, with the stock-pot infrastructure quietly assumed. Sherry, tomato and cayenne alongside the mushrooms mark it as turn-of-the-century hotel cooking rather than anything austerely classical, a period when a garnish was expected to announce itself.