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Eggs, Gratin
Boil eight eggs for eight minutes in plenty of boiling water. Remove, drop into cold water for one minute, then shell them and keep on a plate. Mix in a saucepan one tablespoon butter with one and a half tablespoons flour, pour in one and a half gills hot milk, and half gill cream. Season with half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon each cayenne pepper and grated nutmeg; mix well until it comes to a boil. Cut the eggs into small square pieces and add them to the sauce; mix lightly. Transfer into a baking dish, sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese over all, then set in the oven for eight minutes. Remove and send to the table in the same dish.
A simple hard-boiled egg gratin in a nutmeg-scented béchamel. Two things need translating: the gills, and the oven, which the original never names.
- Gills to cupsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of hot milk is 3/4 cup and half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup. That gives a cup of liquid against one tablespoon butter and one and a half of flour — a fairly loose sauce, which is what you want since it will tighten in the oven.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Eight minutes implies a hot oven, somewhere around 400-425F, to set the top and colour the cheese without drying the eggs. The dish is already fully cooked going in; the oven is only there to brown.
- A saltspoonRoughly 1/4 teaspoon. For cayenne that is a great deal by modern taste — start with a pinch and add more. The nutmeg at 1/4 teaspoon is about right, and it is the flavour that carries the dish.
- Eight minutes for the eggsThat produces yolks just set, perhaps still slightly soft in the centre. Drop them into cold water as directed, though the recipe allows only a minute, which is a short cooling before shelling.
- Cutting the eggsCut them with a wet knife or an egg slicer and fold gently. The instruction to "mix lightly" is the hinge: overwork it and the yolks break down into a grainy yellow paste instead of staying as distinct pieces in white sauce.
- Cook the flourLet the butter and flour bubble together a minute before the milk goes in. In a sauce this small and this thin, raw flour is immediately obvious.
- YieldEight eggs in about a cup of sauce serves four as a light supper or lunch dish, two if it is the whole meal. Use a shallow gratin dish rather than a deep one so there is surface for the Parmesan.
Gratin here means what it originally meant in French kitchens — the browned crust scraped from the dish, from gratter, to scrape — not the layered casserole the word suggests to English speakers now. Hard-boiled eggs bound in béchamel and browned under cheese or crumbs was a common use for eggs in nineteenth-century French cookery, a way of turning a cheap, always-available ingredient into something that could be sent to the table in its own dish. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe has the marks of a professional's shorthand: gills rather than cups, saltspoons, no oven temperature, and the assumption that the reader already knows what a white sauce should look like.