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Eggs Molet, Bellows
Cut out from a stale loaf sandwich bread six slices a third of an inch thick, pare off the crusts, then cut each slice in half, then cut each half in square forms. With the point of a keen knife scoop out a lid to hold up the eggs, lightly baste them with a little melted butter, then lay them on a tin, set in the oven for about eight minutes or until a nice golden colour, remove, dress on a hot dish, spread a very little anchovy butter on each. Drop twelve fresh eggs in boiling water and boil for five minutes, lift them up with a skimmer, drop them in cold water for a minute, remove, shell them, then place an egg on each toast, standing up, and keep hot. Scald three sound green peppers in boiling water for two minutes, peel with a coarse towel, cut them in halves, remove all the seeds, then cut each half in two. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in frying pan, add the green peppers, season with three saltspoons salt and briskly fry them for one minute on each side. Arrange a piece on top of each egg, pour a Perigueux sauce over the eggs and serve.
A composed egg dish in the French service style: soft-boiled eggs stood on fried-bread cases, capped with pepper and sauced. Everything but the eggs can be prepared ahead, and the eggs themselves are the whole difficulty.
- Oeufs mollet, and why five minutesMolet is mollet — the stage between soft and hard, with the white just set and the yolk still liquid at the centre. Five minutes suits a large egg dropped into already-boiling water; the cold-water dip stops the cooking and loosens the shell. Peeling them intact is the hinge of the dish, so use eggs a week or more old rather than genuinely new-laid, and shell them under running water.
- The bread casesSix slices, halved and squared, gives twelve pieces for twelve eggs. Cutting "a lid" means scoring and lifting out a shallow square from the top so the egg has a socket to sit in and cannot roll. Stale bread is specified because fresh soaks up the butter and collapses.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F, browns buttered bread in about eight minutes; watch it, as the buttered edges catch quickly.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons is therefore about three-quarters of a teaspoon, which is generous for three peppers — season by taste.
- Green peppersThese are sweet bell peppers, not chillies. Scalding and rubbing with a coarse towel is an older way of skinning them; charring under a broiler and steaming in a covered bowl works better and adds flavour.
- Anchovy butterSoftened butter mashed with anchovy fillet or paste, roughly one anchovy to a tablespoon of butter. "A very little" is meant literally — it sits under a truffle sauce and should register as salt and depth, not fish.
- Perigueux sauceA demi-glace finished with truffle (usually with Madeira), named for Perigueux, the town at the centre of the Perigord truffle country. Filippini assumes you have a stockpot going; a good reduced veal stock or a jarred demi-glace with Madeira and a little truffle paste stands in. Without some truffle element it is simply a brown sauce.
- Yield and timingThe recipe gives no number of servings; twelve eggs on twelve croutons would suit six people at two each. Fry the peppers and reheat the sauce first, boil the eggs last, and plate immediately — mollet eggs stiffen as they sit.
Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book (1906) as an enormous alphabetical run of dishes, many of them tagged with a surname — patrons, colleagues, or friends whose names attached to a garnish once and stuck. "Bellows" may well be one of these dedications rather than a place or a technique, though the book gives no further clue. The dish itself is squarely in the French repertoire of egg cookery that American hotel kitchens had absorbed by the turn of the century: oeufs mollets, shelled and served whole, called for a cook who could peel a barely-set egg without tearing it. The Perigueux sauce places it at the expensive end of the menu, truffles being a standard signal of a luxury service, while the fried bread case is the same croustade that carried poached eggs, sweetbreads and creamed game in hotel cookery of the period.