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Eggs Molet, Arcachon
Place twelve medium, freshly opened oysters in a saucepan, add one-half gill white wine, one gill water and three saltspoons salt, and boil for three minutes. Place in another saucepan one tablespoon butter and a tablespoon flour, stir well, then strain the oyster liquor into the pan, adding a half gill cream and half saltspoon cayenne pepper; then mix until it comes to a boil. Cut the oysters in small square pieces, add to sauce with six anchovies in oil, also cut in small pieces, and mix well. Boil twelve fresh eggs in boiling water for five minutes, take up and drop in cold water for a minute, remove, shell and place on a hot deep dish, pour the sauce over and serve.
A soft-boiled egg dish built on an oyster-and-anchovy velouté, from the era when a gill was still a common kitchen measure. The whole thing lives or dies on the eggs being mollet — white set, yolk still liquid — so have the sauce finished before they go in the water.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz), so half a gill is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon: three of them is 3/4 teaspoon salt, and half a saltspoon of cayenne is a scant 1/8 teaspoon.
- Salt with careBetween the oyster liquor, the 3/4 teaspoon of added salt and six oil-packed anchovies, this seasons itself. Hold the added salt back and taste the finished sauce before it goes over the eggs.
- The oystersThree minutes at a boil is already at the edge for oysters; they firm up fast and go rubbery beyond that. Bring the wine and water to a simmer, drop the oysters in until their edges just ruffle, then lift them out and reduce the poaching liquid separately if you want more flavour.
- Cook the rouxButter and flour "stirred well" needs a minute or two over low heat before the liquid goes in, or the sauce tastes of raw flour. One tablespoon of each will thicken roughly a cup of liquid to a light coating sauce.
- Œufs molletsFive minutes covers a small egg straight from a cool larder. For a modern large egg from the refrigerator, six minutes at a rolling boil gives a set white and a soft yolk; the cold-water plunge is there to stop the cooking and loosen the shell, not to chill the egg through.
- PeelingMollet eggs are fragile — the white is barely firm. Peel them under running water starting at the broad end, and accept that one or two will tear.
- AnchoviesSix oil-packed fillets, drained and chopped fine, dissolve into the sauce as it warms. Tinned anchovies vary a good deal in saltiness, so start with four if you are unsure.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a first course, two eggs each, on one hot deep dish. Warm the dish properly — soft eggs lose heat within a minute.
"Molet" here is mollet, the French term for an egg boiled between soft and hard — white set, yolk still running — which sits at the centre of a whole family of classic garnished egg dishes. Arcachon, the shallow tidal basin south of Bordeaux, has been one of France's great oyster grounds since the nineteenth century, and the name attached to a dish like this one points to the oysters in the sauce. The pairing of oysters with anchovy and cayenne belongs to the same taste for layered salt-and-heat seasoning that produced anchovy butter and Worcestershire-laced sauces on both sides of the Atlantic.