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Eggs Molet, Demi-Deuil
Prepare and keep hot a sauce demi-deuil. Carefully plunge twelve fresh eggs in boiling water for five minutes, remove and keep in cold water for a minute, shell and place on a deep hot dish, pour the sauce over them and serve.
Two things carry this dish: the five-minute egg, and a sauce the recipe assumes you already have simmering. Neither is difficult, but both are unforgiving of inattention.
- Sauce demi-deuil"Half-mourning" sauce is generally a white sauce — a suprême or allemande on a chicken velouté base, often finished with cream and egg yolk — studded with sliced or chopped black truffle. The recipe gives no formula and no proportions; it expects you to turn to the book's sauce chapter. If the sauce you use carries a yolk liaison, keep it just below a simmer and stir it, or it will curdle.
- Œufs mollet, not soft-boiled in the shellFive minutes in fully boiling water gives a white barely set and a yolk still liquid at the centre. That timing assumes eggs at room temperature and a size close to a modern large egg; cold from the refrigerator, add roughly 30 seconds. Anything past six minutes and the point of the dish is lost.
- The hinge is the peelingA five-minute egg has a white that tears at a look. The minute in cold water is not optional — it stops the cooking and shrinks the white from the shell. Crack the shell all over, then peel under running cold water so it floats the membrane away. Very fresh eggs peel worst; eggs a week or so old peel best.
- Boiling water, not a cold startThe eggs go into water already at a rolling boil. Lower them on a spoon rather than dropping them, and do not crowd the pan — twelve eggs need a wide pot and a return to the boil quickly, or the timing drifts.
- "Deep hot dish"A warmed deep serving dish, as specified, so the sauce pools around the eggs rather than running off. The eggs cool fast once shelled, so warm the dish and have the sauce ready before the eggs come out of the water.
- YieldTwelve eggs, two apiece, would serve six as a first course; the recipe itself states no number.
- Runny yolkThe yolk is not brought to a safe temperature. That is what the dish is, but it makes it unsuitable for anyone pregnant, very young, elderly or immunocompromised unless pasteurized eggs are used.
- Truffle economicsFresh black truffle was used more freely in the restaurant cookery of the period than it is now, though it was never cheap. Preserved truffle or truffle peelings in their juice will read correctly; truffle oil will not, and its aroma dissipates in a hot cream sauce.
Demi-deuil — "half-mourning" — is one of the frankest names in French cookery: black truffle against white flesh or white sauce, the colours, by the traditional explanation, of a mourning dress in its second, less severe stage. The style is most closely associated with Lyon and its mères, the women cooks who ran the city's bouchons and small restaurants, where poularde demi-deuil, a hen with truffle slices slid under the skin before poaching, became the signature dish; it is generally traced to Mère Fillioux and carried on by Eugénie Brazier. Applied to eggs, the idea shrinks to a household scale: the same white sauce, the same black flecks, but built on twelve eggs rather than a truffled fowl. That is characteristic of Filippini's International Cook Book, which ranges across national kitchens and repeatedly takes a grand restaurant preparation and sets it down in a form a competent cook with a good sauce chapter could manage. The œuf mollet itself — the egg cooked between soft and hard, shelled and sauced — was a standard building block of the period, treated much as a poached egg is now.</p>