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Eggs Molet, Au Gratin
Plunge twelve fresh eggs in plenty of boiling water for five minutes, remove and drop them in cold water for a minute, take up and shell them, then place in a baking dish.
Prepare a sauce Italienne, pour it over the eggs, sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese over them, set in the oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
An œuf mollet is the middle ground between soft- and hard-boiled: the white fully set, the yolk still creamy enough to run into the sauce. Everything here hinges on getting the eggs out of the water at the right second and peeling them without tearing.
- The five minutes are not negotiableThe five minutes matter -- At a full rolling boil, five minutes gives a set white and a soft, spoonable yolk on a large egg. A minute more and the yolk begins to firm; by seven or eight it is well on its way to hard-boiled. Time from the moment the eggs go in, with the water back at the boil quickly, and allow for egg size and how cold they were to start.
- Peeling a mollet eggThe cold-water minute is there to firm the outer white enough to handle, not to chill the egg through. Crack and peel under a thin stream of cold running water, starting at the wide end; very fresh eggs (as specified) are the hardest to shell, so eggs a week or so old actually behave better here.
- Sauce ItalienneA classic sauce italienne is a brown sauce — demi-glace or a reduced meat stock — finished with duxelles of mushroom, chopped lean ham, shallot, white wine and chopped tarragon and parsley. Reckon on about 2 cups for twelve eggs. A good jarred demi-glace base or a strongly reduced beef stock will stand in.
- Oven heatThe book gives none. Use a hot oven, 425F, for the five minutes: the point is to glaze the top and warm the sauce, not to cook the eggs further. A minute or two under the broiler browns the cheese better than the oven will.
- More cheese than thatOne tablespoon of Parmesan across twelve eggs will not gratin. Use 1/3 to 1/2 cup of freshly grated Parmesan, and have the sauce hot when it goes over the eggs so the dish needs no more than a brief pass through the oven.
- Assemble at the last momentPeeled mollet eggs sitting in hot sauce continue to cook from the residual heat. Keep the shelled eggs in a bowl of warm (not hot) water, drain and blot them, then sauce, cheese and straight into the oven.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, two eggs each, with bread to catch the sauce. Halve the whole thing comfortably.
Œufs mollets occupy a whole page of the French repertoire that English-language cookery never quite adopted: eggs boiled to the point where the white will hold its shape once peeled, then treated like a piece of poached protein — napped with a sauce, set on a bed of spinach or artichoke bottoms, glazed under heat. Escoffier's Guide Culinaire lists dozens of such garnishes, and the sauce italienne called for here is one of his small brown sauces, its defining element a duxelles of finely chopped mushrooms cooked down with shallot. The name is often said to be conventional rather than geographical, and the connection to Italy is at best uncertain. Its appearance in a book called The International Cook Book says a good deal about the period: for an American cook of the time, "international" meant, above all, French professional technique.