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Eggs Molet, Bordelaise
Boil twelve fresh eggs in boiling water for five minutes, take up and drop them in cold water for one minute, lift up, shell them carefully and place on a hot dish. Pour a Bordelaise sauce, but without marrow, over the eggs, sprinkle a little freshly chopped parsley over and serve.
Two things carry this dish: eggs cooked to the exact point where the white is firm and the yolk still flows, and a sauce hot enough to hold up against them. Everything else is assembly.
- "Molet" means molletAn egg cooked between soft-boiled and hard-boiled — white fully set, yolk still liquid or barely thickened — then peeled and served whole in or under a sauce. It is not a garnish egg; it is the body of the plate.
- Five minutes is for a specific eggFive minutes suits a room-temperature medium egg lowered into water already at a rolling boil. A large egg straight from the refrigerator wants closer to six. Test one before committing all twelve.
- Cold water, and mean itOne minute in genuinely icy water checks the cooking and helps the white shrink slightly away from the shell. Merely tap-cold water cools them less effectively, and a minute is in any case only enough to make them handleable.
- Peeling is the difficultyA five-minute egg is fragile. Crack the wide end, peel under a thin stream of cold water, and work the shell off with the membrane rather than picking at fragments. Very fresh eggs — which the recipe asks for — are the hardest to peel cleanly; eggs a week or so old shell far better.
- Bordelaise sauceA reduction of red wine with shallot, thyme and bay, finished with a brown stock or demi-glace. The classic version is garnished with poached beef marrow; here that is explicitly left out, so the sauce is simply the wine-and-stock reduction, strained and buttered.
- Everything hotWarm the serving dish and have the sauce at a bare simmer. A cooled mollet egg under a lukewarm brown sauce is unpleasant, and reheating the eggs sets the yolks.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a first course, or four as a light main with bread. Allow enough sauce to coat each egg generously.
Sauce bordelaise takes its name from Bordeaux and from the red wine of the region, and in nineteenth-century French practice it was often garnished with poached beef marrow set on top; the instructions here specify "without marrow." Eggs mollet were a staple device of the classical kitchen precisely because they could be sauced: peeled and whole, they take a coating the way a cutlet does, and the running yolk works into the sauce at the table. The whole dish is really an argument for the stock pot: without a proper brown reduction on hand, there is nothing here but a boiled egg.