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Eggs Molet, Lyonnaise
Cut in half and finely slice two medium, white onions, place in a saucepan with tablespoon melted butter and fry eight minutes, stirring with fork once in a while. Pour in one and a half gills demi-glace, add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and half saltspoon cayenne pepper; mix well and boil five minutes. Boil twelve fresh eggs five minutes, take up and drop in cold water one minute. Shell them and place on a deep hot dish. Pour the sauce over and serve.
A straightforward dish of peeled soft-boiled eggs under an onion sauce; the only real difficulty is getting twelve five-minute eggs out of their shells intact.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills is about 3/4 cup of sauce. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making "half a saltspoon" of cayenne roughly 1/8 teaspoon — enough to warm the sauce without turning it red.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole reduced with brown stock, a standing item in a professional kitchen of the period and rare in a home kitchen now. Good jarred demi-glace or veal glace diluted to sauce consistency works; a heavily reduced beef stock stiffened with a little beurre manie is the home substitute.
- The hinge: peelingEverything depends on shelling five-minute eggs whose yolks are still liquid. Use eggs at least a week old rather than truly fresh ones, drop them into already-boiling water, and after the cold-water bath crack and peel them submerged so water gets under the membrane. Expect to lose one or two.
- Cold water, then warmthOne minute in cold water stops the cooking without chilling the yolk to nothing. Use cold tap water rather than ice, and have the serving dish genuinely hot — these eggs go tepid within a minute of peeling.
- The onionsEight minutes in a tablespoon of butter over moderate heat softens the onions and takes off the raw edge; the recipe does not ask for them to be browned. Slice thin so the strands lie flat under the eggs.
- Boiling the sauceFive minutes at a boil is there to reduce and marry the demi-glace with the onions. Add the parsley at the end instead, off the heat, if you want it green rather than khaki.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, two apiece, with bread to take up the sauce. Halve the whole thing easily; the sauce quantity scales directly.
Oeufs mollets — the French term the book anglicises as "molet" — are eggs boiled to the stage between soft and hard, shelled whole so the set white holds a still-liquid yolk. They were a staple of the classical repertoire precisely because they could be sauced like a poached egg with none of the poacher's fuss, and Escoffier gives a long list of garnishes for them. "Lyonnaise" in French cookery is shorthand for onions, Lyon being associated with onion cookery, and the label attaches to everything from potatoes to tripe to this sauce of sliced onion loosened with demi-glace. The recipe assumes a kitchen with brown sauce already on hand, an assumption that dates it more firmly than any of its measurements.