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Eggs Molet, Bearnaise
Boil twelve fresh eggs for five minutes. Remove, then drop them in cold water, take up and shell.
Dress the eggs on a deep, hot dish. Season with half a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Pour a Bearnaise sauce over the eggs and serve.
An œuf mollet is the awkward middle child of egg cookery: set enough to peel, soft enough to run when cut. Everything here depends on the timing and the peeling.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two of them is half a teaspoon of white pepper against half a teaspoon of salt. That is a lot of pepper for twelve eggs by modern taste; season the dish lightly and let the sauce carry the rest.
- Five minutes, adjustedFive minutes probably assumes eggs dropped into already-boiling water, and eggs of the period may have run smaller than today's large grade. For large eggs straight from the refrigerator, 6 to 6 1/2 minutes at a bare boil gives a firm white and a fluid yolk. Under-timed eggs will not survive shelling.
- The cold water is not optionalThe plunge into cold water stops the cooking and shrinks the egg slightly from the shell membrane. Leave them two or three minutes, no longer, or the eggs go cold and the dish loses its point.
- PeelingCrack the shell all over and peel under a trickle of cold water, starting at the wide end where the air cell sits. Older eggs peel far more cleanly than very fresh ones, which is the one respect in which the book's call for "fresh eggs" works against you.
- Keeping them hotPeeled mollet eggs can sit in water held at about 140F while you finish the sauce, then be drained on a cloth. The "deep, hot dish" matters: a cold platter will pull the heat out of the eggs and thicken the sauce on contact.
- The sauceBéarnaise names this entry, the recipe assumes a Béarnaise sauce.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a luncheon or supper dish, two eggs each, with bread or a plain green salad. Halve the whole thing without any adjustment.
Mollet is simply French for soft, and the technique sits deliberately between the coddled egg in its shell and the poached egg, giving the same runny yolk without the ragged edges poaching produces. Béarnaise, often said to have originated at Le Pavillon Henri IV at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the 1830s and traditionally linked by name to Henri IV and the Béarn region in the southwest, had by 1900 become one of the standard warm emulsions of professional kitchens, and pairing it with eggs would suit a hotel kitchen well: if the sauce is already being made for grill orders, a tray of peeled mollet eggs turns it into a dish that can leave the kitchen in a minute. The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, and this entry has the shape of restaurant work rather than home cooking — twelve eggs at once, seasoned by the spoonful, dressed on a hot dish and sent out.