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Eggs in Jelly
Have three quarts boiling water in a saucepan with two tablespoons vinegar and a light tablespoon salt. Carefully crack in six fresh eggs, and poach three minutes, lift up with a skimmer, drop in cold water five minutes. Remove and neatly trim, arrange on a cloth and let drain five minutes. Lightly melt in a saucepan two gills jelly, then place the eggs in six paper cases and cover with the jelly, place in the ice box and let thoroughly set. Remove and serve.
This is œufs en gelée under a plain English name: soft-poached eggs set in savory aspic and served cold. Two details decide whether it works — the state of the jelly when it goes over the eggs, and how neatly the eggs are trimmed.
- The jelly is savory, not sweet"Jelly" here means clarified meat or poultry aspic — jellied consommé, or stock set with gelatin. Nothing about the dish suggests fruit preserve, and sweet jelly over a poached egg would be inedible.
- Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of melted aspic. That is just enough to cover six eggs in small molds with no margin; make a cup and a half if the molds are generous.
- Melt it lightly, then let it coolThe hinge of the recipe. Aspic poured on hot will slacken the poached whites and cloud. Melt it just to liquid, then let it cool to barely tepid — thick enough to coat a spoon's back but still pourable — before it goes over the eggs.
- Paper casesSmall pleated paper soufflé cases, the kind used for petits fours. Ramekins, dariole molds or teacups do the same job and unmold more cleanly if you rinse them with cold water first or line them with a film of aspic.
- Poaching waterThree quarts is a deep pan on purpose: the eggs fall clear of the bottom and set in a ball. The vinegar helps the whites coagulate; a light tablespoon of salt is fine, but heavy salting slackens whites rather than firming them.
- Three minutesThat gives a set white and a liquid yolk, which is the classic result for this dish. If you want the yolk merely creamy rather than running when cut, go to four minutes — beyond that the yolk chalks and the point of the dish is lost.
- The cold water and the trimmingFive minutes in cold water stops the cooking and firms the egg for handling. Trim the ragged skirt of white with scissors or a small knife so the egg reads as a smooth oval through the jelly; draining on a cloth keeps water from thinning the aspic.
- Setting time"Thoroughly set" means several hours in the refrigerator, or overnight. Serve straight from the cold — aspic collapses quickly at room temperature.
- Yield and serviceSix servings, one egg each, as a first course or a cold luncheon dish. A leaf of tarragon or a sliver of ham laid in the bottom of the mold before the first spoonful of jelly shows through the finished egg.
- Soft yolks held coldA three-minute yolk is not pasteurized, and this dish keeps it chilled for hours before serving. If you are cooking for anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized-in-shell eggs and keep the finished cases refrigerated until the moment they go to the table.
Eggs in aspic belong to the French cold larder, where a good clarified jelly was the mark of a serious kitchen — the same stock that went into consommé, reduced and set, then used to glaze and preserve cold meats, fish and eggs on the buffet. Dishes of this kind passed into English and American cookery along with the rest of the professional French repertoire, and the appeal to a household cook is plain: it is cheap, prepared entirely in advance, and looks expensively finished. Note too that the recipe assumes a supply of jelly on hand rather than telling you to make it.