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Eggs, Colley
Finely chop four sound shallots, place them in a small saucepan with a tablespoon melted butter and cook to a light brown; add ten chopped canned mushrooms, cook for six minutes, stirring occasionally, pour in two tablespoons sherry and one gill demi-glace, let boil for ten minutes, then pour in a large baking dish. Carefully crack twelve fresh eggs over and season with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, evenly divided. Pour over the eggs a half gill thick cream, sprinkle over two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese, set in the oven for six minutes, remove and serve.
A baked shallot-and-mushroom ragout with eggs cracked over the top — closer to modern uova al forno than to anything scrambled. Two things need translating: the demi-glace and the oven time.
- The hinge: the sauce base must be hotSix minutes will not set twelve eggs in a cold dish. The mushroom and demi-glace mixture goes into the baking dish still boiling, and the dish itself should be warm, so the whites begin to set from below the moment the eggs land. If the base has cooled, expect fifteen minutes or more.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none, which in a book of this vintage means the cook was expected to judge it. For eggs over a hot sauce, 400F is right; hotter browns the Parmesan before the whites set, cooler and the yolks harden while you wait.
- A gill, and a saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so the demi-glace is 1/2 cup and the cream 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the pepper about 1/2 teaspoon total.
- Demi-glaceBrown veal stock reduced with sauce espagnole until it coats a spoon — a professional kitchen staple in 1906, when a stockpot ran all day. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate is the practical substitute; failing that, 1/2 cup strong beef or veal stock reduced by half, with a knob of butter whisked in at the end.
- Canned mushroomsA common commercial ingredient at the time, and the recipe treats them as a matter of course. Fresh cremini, sliced and cooked until they have given up their water and started to colour, give more flavour; the six minutes in the recipe assumes mushrooms already cooked and drained.
- DonenessEggs baked this way come out with set whites and liquid yolks, which is the intent. If that is not wanted, cover the dish with foil for the last few minutes — the trapped steam sets the yolk tops without overcooking the whites.
- Dish and yieldTwelve eggs need a wide shallow gratin dish, roughly 9 by 13 inches, so they sit in one layer rather than crowding. It serves six as a main course with bread, or ten or twelve as part of a larger breakfast.
Alexander Filippini spent years as a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) reflects that world: page after page of egg dishes, many differing from one another by a single garnish and each given a name. "Colley" may well be a person -- a patron or a colleague -- but nothing in the book explains the name, and no trace of it survives beyond the recipe itself. The form is the durable part: eggs baked over a hot, well-reduced sauce and finished with cream and cheese was one way a restaurant kitchen turned eggs into a course worth charging for, and the reliance on demi-glace shows how far these recipes assumed the machinery of a professional kitchen behind them.