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Eggs Molet, Baltimore
Cut six large raw oysters in four pieces each, place in a small saucepan with a finely chopped truffle, two tablespoons sherry, one and a half gills demi-glace half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and half saltspoon cayenne pepper. Mix well and let boil for five minutes. Boil twelve fresh eggs for five minutes, take up and plunge in cold water for one minute, shell, dress on a dish, pour sauce over and serve.
A Delmonico-style egg dish that stands or falls on two timings: the eggs and the oysters. Everything else is assembly.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of demi-glace is about 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the cayenne a scant eighth of a teaspoon — enough to warm the sauce, not colour it.
- Do not boil the oysters five minutesThis is the instruction to ignore. Cut oysters firm up in well under two minutes and turn to rubber after that. Simmer the truffle, sherry, demi-glace, parsley and cayenne together for five minutes to reduce and marry, then slide the oysters in at the end and cook only until their edges ruffle.
- Oeufs molletsMollet means the white is set and the yolk still liquid at the centre. Five minutes at a rolling boil suits large eggs straight from the refrigerator; the one-minute cold plunge stops the cooking and loosens the shell. Peel under running water, since the shell of a mollet egg is unforgiving.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown veal stock and sauce espagnole, cooked down to a coating consistency. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate works; a thin canned beef gravy does not, and the sauce will slide off the eggs.
- TruffleOne chopped black truffle was a routine restaurant garnish when this was written and is now the most expensive thing on the list. A teaspoon of truffle peelings, or their soaking liquid added with the sherry, carries the same aroma; leaving it out entirely gives a plainer but honest oyster sauce.
- OystersSix large oysters means six shucked, with their liquor. Reserve the liquor and add it to the sauce — it is the seasoning the recipe otherwise lacks, since no salt is called for.
- ServingTwelve eggs and six oysters serve six as a first course, two eggs each. Warm the platter; mollet eggs cool fast and the sauce sets on a cold dish. Dress and sauce them at the last moment.
Oeufs mollets — literally "soft eggs" — sat between the boiled egg and the poached egg in the French repertoire, and turn-of-the-century American hotel kitchens ran through dozens of garnished versions of them. This book belongs to the era when American hotel kitchens paired an unmistakably French sauce base — demi-glace, sherry, truffle — with a local shellfish and let the name do the explaining.