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Eggs, Maconnaise
Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a small saucepan, add six finely chopped shallots and gently brown for four minutes, stirring meanwhile; add a tablespoon flour, stir well while heating for one minute, pour in one gill red claret and let reduce to half the quantity, then add a gill demi-glace, half teaspoon each chopped parsley and chives, a saltspoon chopped tarragon, mix well and let boil for ten minutes. Carefully crack twelve fresh eggs in a baking dish, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, pour the sauce over the eggs, set in the oven for six minutes, remove and serve.
A red-wine sauce poured over eggs baked in a shallow dish — closer to eggs sur le plat than to anything scrambled. The sauce carries the dish, and it can be made well ahead.
- The sauce is the workEverything before the eggs is a small brown wine sauce: shallots browned in butter, a flour roux, wine reduced by half, then stock. Have it finished and hot before the eggs go anywhere near the dish, because six minutes is not long enough to cook a sauce and set eggs together.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. So half a cup of red wine reduced to a quarter cup, then half a cup of demi-glace.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. The seasoning as written comes to half a teaspoon salt and half a teaspoon pepper for twelve eggs, plus a quarter teaspoon of chopped tarragon.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thickened; the commercial concentrates sold in tubs are a reasonable stand-in if diluted to the strength of a thick gravy. Plain canned broth will leave the sauce thin and sharp once the wine goes in.
- ClaretIn 1900 English and American usage, red Bordeaux. Any dry, moderately tannic red works; the wine is reduced by half, so faults concentrate rather than cook off.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Eggs cooked this way want a hot oven if the whites are to set in the six minutes stated; in a cooler oven they will need longer, and the yolks will harden before the whites are done.
- Pouring the sauceThe recipe says to pour the sauce over the eggs; if you would rather keep the yolks bare, spoon it around and between them instead, since sauce sitting on a yolk insulates it.
- YieldTwelve eggs would serve about six at two apiece, with bread for the sauce. The recipe says only 'a baking dish', but a wide shallow one helps: crowded eggs in a deep dish steam rather than set.
The name points to Mâcon, in southern Burgundy, and to the family of red-wine preparations the French kitchen labels à la mâconnaise — shallots, red wine reduced hard, and a brown sauce, the same logic as a meurette or œufs en matelote. Eggs poached or baked in red wine are a long-standing Burgundian habit, generally explained as a way of putting the local wine to work in a dish that costs almost nothing. On this page of The International Cook Book, the spelling has drifted and Bordeaux claret stands in for a Burgundy — a continental dish set down for American kitchens in terms an English-speaking cook of 1906 could follow. The recipe also assumes a household with demi-glace on hand.