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Eggs Molet, Cream Sauce
Boil twelve fresh eggs in boiling water for five minutes, lift up and gently drop them in cold water for half a minute, shell and place on a deep, hot dish, pour a cream sauce over them and serve.
An oeuf mollet — set white, still-liquid yolk — served hot under a cream sauce. Everything depends on the timing and on getting the shells off without wrecking the eggs.
- The hinge: peelingHalf a minute in cold water only stops the cooking; it does not chill the egg enough to peel cleanly. Use a proper ice bath and give the eggs two to three minutes, then crack and peel under running water starting at the wide end. Very fresh eggs, which the recipe calls for, are notoriously the hardest to shell; eggs a week or two old release far better.
- Five minutes, checkedFive minutes suits a smaller, room-temperature egg dropped into water at a full boil. For a large egg straight from the refrigerator, 5½ to 6 minutes gives the same result: white just firm, yolk flowing. Lower the eggs in on a spoon and keep the water at a bare rolling boil throughout.
- Cream sauceNo sauce recipe is given here; a white roux loosened with milk or cream and seasoned is what is meant. Any standard b hough make it slightly thinner than you would for gratin so it coats the eggs rather than smothering them.
- Keeping them hotPeeled mollet eggs cool fast and cannot be reheated in the shell. Hold them in water at about 140°F while you finish the sauce, drain on a cloth, and set them straight onto the heated dish.
- The deep hot dishNot decoration. A shallow cold platter drops the temperature of both eggs and sauce within a minute; warm the dish in a low oven first.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, two per person. The recipe names no accompaniment; buttered toast, spinach or asparagus underneath are common ones.
Oeuf mollet is simply French for a soft egg, the middle term between the oeuf à la coque eaten from the shell and the hard-boiled oeuf dur. Its usefulness in professional kitchens is that it comes out of the shell whole and can be sauced, glazed, set on an artichoke bottom or dropped into a tart — which is why the form recurs in French service manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A plain cream sauce is the most basic of those treatments. Its inclusion in a book of international cookery for American households reflects how thoroughly French technique dominated the restaurant cooking of the period, and how much of it was being translated for domestic cooks who had never worked a hotel line.