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Eggs En Cocotte with Sardines
Skin, bone and cut in small pieces six medium sardines, place in a saucepan with one and a half gills demi-glace and a little freshly chopped parsley. Mix well and boil five minutes. Divide the sauce into six cocotte-egg dishes. Crack two fresh eggs into each dish. Evenly season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Squeeze juice of half a sound lemon over, lay in a tin, set in oven five minutes. Remove and serve.
A French egg dish that depends almost entirely on residual heat and timing: the sauce goes in hot, the eggs go in cold, and the window between set white and hard yolk is about two minutes wide.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of demi-glace is about 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the pepper here a rounded half teaspoon across twelve eggs.
- Demi-glaceAt the period this meant a reduced brown sauce built on veal stock and espagnole, thick enough to coat. Good tubbed or jarred demi-glace is sold now; failing that, reduce a cup of strong brown veal or beef stock with a spoonful of tomato until it lightly naps a spoon.
- Cocotte dishesSmall individual porcelain or earthenware pots, roughly 4 to 6 oz — ordinary ramekins are the direct equivalent. Two eggs is a tight fit in a 4 oz ramekin; use 6 oz if you have them.
- The tin means a water bathThe tin -- "Lay in a tin" most likely points to a water bath: the cocottes set in a roasting pan with hot water halfway up their sides, which is the standard method for these dishes — though the recipe itself specifies only a tin. Without water the bases can overcook while the tops stay raw. Buttering the ramekins does no harm, though the original does not call for it.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. For eggs en cocotte in a bain-marie, 375-400F is the working range, with the water already hot when the pan goes in.
- Five minutes is optimisticThat timing assumes very hot sauce, warm dishes and an oven already loaded. From cold eggs in cold ramekins, expect 10 to 14 minutes — pull them when the whites are just opaque and the yolks still shiver, as they carry on setting off the heat.
- SaltTinned sardines are salted and demi-glace is reduced stock, so if you use tinned fish both are already salty. Taste the sauce before adding the half teaspoon of salt; you may want none.
- The sardines"Skin, bone" suggests fresh fish; tinned sardines in oil are the practical modern substitute, drained well, or the oil will slick the top of the sauce. Six medium fish is roughly one standard small tin.
- YieldSix cocottes of two eggs each: six servings as a first course, or three or four as a light supper with toast.
Œufs en cocotte belong to the French repertoire of gently baked eggs that filled the gap between the omelette and the poached egg on late nineteenth-century menus, and they suited restaurant service because each portion cooked in the vessel it was carried to the table in. This version comes from Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, whose books translate professional Franco-American cooking into household directions — which is why a home recipe can casually call for three-quarters of a cup of demi-glace, a sauce that assumes a stockpot always going. The sardines mark the period as much as the sauce does: tinned sardines were, by 1900, among the cheaper reliable pantry goods in an American kitchen, and cookbooks of the era press them into service in salads, sandwiches, canapés and, as here, a dish otherwise built like restaurant food.