Home › The World's Kitchen › Eggs Molet, Jacksonville
Eggs Molet, Jacksonville
Prepare a cream sauce. Remove the shells from twelve cooked shrimps, then cut them in quarter-inch pieces, add them to the sauce with a half teaspoon chopped tarragon leaves, mix well and boil for five minutes. Boil twelve fresh eggs for five minutes, remove, drop in cold water for a minute, shell them and lay on a deep, hot dish, pour the sauce over and serve.
A soft-boiled egg dish dressed with shrimp cream sauce. The recipe assumes you know what a cream sauce is and that you can peel a five-minute egg, which are the two places it can go wrong.
- Eggs mollet, not hard-boiledMolet is mollet, French for soft. The recipe does not say whether the eggs go into cold or already-boiling water; started in boiling water, five minutes gives a set white and a barely-thickened yolk. The cold-water minute stops the cooking and makes them easier to peel. Peel under a trickle of cold water, starting at the fat end, and handle them as if they were full of liquid, because they are.
- Cream sauceThe recipe assumes a standard white roux: about 2 tbsp butter and 2 tbsp flour cooked without colouring, then 2 cups of scalded milk or half milk and half cream, whisked smooth and simmered until it coats a spoon. Season with salt and white pepper. Two cups is about right for twelve eggs.
- Shrimp sizeTwelve shrimp for twelve eggs only makes sense if they are large. Use about 8 oz of peeled shrimp, cooked just until opaque, and cut them into the specified quarter-inch pieces so they distribute rather than clump.
- Boiling the sauce five minutesAdd the shrimp at the end and warm them through for a minute or two rather than boiling them for five; already-cooked shrimp held at a boil turn tough and rubbery. Five minutes of simmering is useful for the sauce itself, before the shrimp go in.
- TarragonHalf a teaspoon chopped fresh tarragon. Dried tarragon is flatter and hay-like; if that is what you have, use a scant quarter teaspoon and give it the full simmer in the sauce to soften.
- The hot dish mattersA cold platter will chill peeled mollet eggs in seconds and the sauce will skin over. Warm the deep dish in a 200F oven, pour a little sauce in first, set the eggs on it and mask them with the rest.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, two apiece, or twelve as a first course. Assemble it at the last moment — it does not hold and cannot be reheated.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), and it belongs to a large family of entries in that volume named for American cities and hotels — Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, catalogued dishes the way a maître d'hôtel keeps a card index, tagging each with a place rather than a description. The Jacksonville tag points to Florida shrimp, though the South Atlantic shrimp fishery's large-scale expansion came later, following the introduction of the otter trawl around 1913. The technique itself is straight French: oeufs mollets, the awkward middle stage between soft- and hard-boiled, are peeled eggs with a liquid yolk, which can be sauced like a poached one while holding their shape better on the plate.