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Eggs, Matelote
Cut in halves twelve hard-boiled eggs and keep on a plate. Heat in a saucepan one tablespoon butter, add one finely sliced white onion and brown five minutes; add one tablespoon flour, stir while heating one minute, then pour in a half gill claret, one and a half gills demi-glace, six sliced canned mushrooms, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Mix until it comes to a boil, then add the eggs to sauce, gently mix with wooden spoon, cover pan, let slowly cook for ten minutes, pour into a deep dish and serve.
A simple sauce dish that depends almost entirely on the quality of the demi-glace. Two archaic liquid measures and one archaic spoon need translating before you start.
- GillsA gill is 4 fl oz in American usage, or half a cup. So the half gill of claret is 1/4 cup (4 tablespoons) and the gill and a half of demi-glace is 3/4 cup — about a cup of liquid in all for twelve eggs, so expect it to coat rather than pool.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two of them means 1/2 teaspoon white pepper, which is assertive but correct for this sauce.
- ClaretPeriod shorthand for dry red Bordeaux. Any dry, unoaked red works; avoid anything jammy or high in alcohol, since there is too little liquid here to cook off a heavy wine.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal or beef stock, thickened and glossy. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace concentrate is the practical substitute; if you use a cube-based stock, reduce it hard first, because unreduced broth will leave the dish watery and salty.
- The flourOne tablespoon of flour goes against about a cup of liquid once the claret and demi-glace are combined, and the demi-glace is already thick on its own. Cook the flour in the butter and onion for the full minute so it loses its raw taste, and be ready to loosen the sauce with a spoonful of stock or water if it sets up too thick during the ten-minute simmer.
- Handle the eggs onceHalved hard-boiled whites tear easily. Slide them in yolk-side up, turn them over gently a single time with the wooden spoon, then leave them alone under the lid — the ten minutes is only to warm them through and let them take up the sauce.
- Canned mushroomsFine as written, but drain them well. Fresh cremini, sliced and browned with the onion, give more depth and are closer to what the sauce is meant to taste of.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, four if it is the main event. Serve it in the deep dish as directed, with bread or plain boiled potatoes to take up the sauce.
Matelote comes from the French matelot, sailor, and originally meant a freshwater fish stew — eel, carp, pike — braised in red wine with onions and mushrooms. Over time the word migrated from the dish to the sauce, so that anything served à la matelote meant anything napped in a red-wine sauce, whether or not a fish was anywhere near it. Eggs got the treatment too, as they did with Bordelaise, Bercy and Mornay. The real instruction lies buried in a phrase like "one and a half gills demi-glace," which assumes a pot of reduced brown stock is simply there in the icebox.