Home › The World's Kitchen › Eggs Molet, Espagnole
Eggs Molet, Espagnole
Prepare a Creole sauce, adding two Spanish sweet peppers cut in julienne strips, gently mix and keep hot. Plunge twelve fresh eggs in boiling water five minutes, take up, drop in cold water one minute, remove and shell, then place on a hot deep dish, pour the sauce over and serve.
A five-minute egg, shelled and sauced — the whole dish turns on getting the eggs out of their shells intact. Everything else is assembly.
- What molet meansOeuf mollet is the stage between soft-boiled and hard-boiled: white fully set, yolk still liquid at the centre. Five minutes at a true rolling boil is right for a large egg straight from the refrigerator; four for a smaller or room-temperature one.
- Shelling is the hingeA five-minute white is fragile, so the one-minute cold dip is not optional — it firms the outer white and loosens the membrane. Crack and peel under running cold water, starting at the wide end, and work gently. Very fresh eggs, oddly, are the hardest to peel; eggs a week or two old shell far more cleanly.
- Creole sauceIn a book of this vintage that generally means a tomato base cooked down with onion, green pepper, garlic, bay and cayenne. Something in the region of 3 cups would suit twelve eggs; have it hot and fairly thick, or it will slide off.
- Spanish sweet peppersThese are pimientos, the soft, sweet, skinned red peppers sold in jars. Piquillos are the closest thing on most shelves. The recipe stirs them into the finished sauce and says to mix gently, so they stay in distinct strips rather than dissolving.
- JulienneMatchsticks, roughly 2 inches long and an eighth of an inch wide. Jarred peppers are already peeled and pliable, so cut them flat on the board with a thin knife.
- Keeping them hotShelled mollet eggs can be held briefly in hot (not boiling) salted water, though the yolks will keep firming the longer they sit. Lift out and drain before saucing.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, with bread or rice to catch the sauce. The recipe scales down without adjustment.
Oeufs mollets were a staple of professional French cookery precisely because they could be shelled and dressed like a poached egg while being far quicker to turn out in quantity — twelve at a time in one pot rather than one at a time in a pan of vinegar water. The espagnole in the title here is doing its old menu-French job of signalling tomato, garlic and sweet pepper rather than referring to the brown sauce of the same name. Underneath it sits a Creole sauce, the tomato-and-pepper idiom taking its place here as comfortably as any European sauce.