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Eggs Molet, Moderne
Boil twelve fresh eggs five minutes, take up and plunge in cold water one minute, remove, shell and place in a hot deep dish. Prepare a cream sauce, add six finely sliced, canned mushrooms, two sweet peppers cut in small squares, three anchovies in oil cut in small pieces and half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley; mix a little, then let boil five minutes. Pour sauce over eggs and serve.
An œuf mollet is the middle ground between soft- and hard-boiled: white fully set, yolk still creamy. Everything here depends on hitting that point and not letting the eggs sit in hot sauce long enough to go past it.
- The five minutes are the hingeFive minutes from a rolling boil gives a set white and a soft, spoonable yolk in a large egg. Older or fridge-cold eggs may want a little longer; much past six or seven minutes the yolk starts to set firm, and you end up with a stiffer egg than the sauce was designed for.
- Peeling mollet eggsThe one minute in cold water stops the cooking but leaves the eggs fragile. Crack the shell all over and peel under running water, starting at the broad end where the air pocket is. Very fresh eggs peel badly; eggs a week or so old release cleanly, which is worth knowing since the recipe asks for fresh.
- How much cream sauceNo quantity is given. For twelve eggs, figure about 2 to 2 1/2 cups of medium béchamel or cream sauce — roughly 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, 2 cups milk or half milk and cream.
- Sweet peppersIn an American kitchen of this period this may well have meant canned pimientos, sold in small tins and already soft; note that the recipe specifies "canned" for the mushrooms but not for the peppers. A red bell pepper works, but sweat the squares in butter first; raw pepper in a five-minute sauce stays crunchy and tastes green.
- Anchovies and saltThree oil-packed anchovy fillets will largely dissolve into the hot sauce and carry a good deal of salt with them. Season the béchamel only lightly before they go in, then taste at the end.
- Boiling the sauceFive minutes at a bare simmer is enough to cook out the flour and marry the additions. Keep it below a hard boil once the cream is in, and stir, or the anchovy oil and the milk will separate.
- Assembly and timingHave the sauce finished and the dish hot before the eggs come out of the water. Peeled mollet eggs cool fast and continue to firm up if they sit in hot sauce, so pour and serve immediately.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, or twelve as a first course. Toast points or plain boiled rice underneath catch the sauce.
Mollet is simply French for soft — the term distinguishes an egg boiled in the shell to a set white and liquid yolk from both à la coque (softer, eaten from the shell) and dur (hard). Because the mollet egg is shelled, it behaves like a poached egg without the poaching, and classical French cookery used it the same way: napped with a sauce, set on a bed of purée, or sunk into aspic. "Moderne" here is doing period work rather than describing anything ancient, though the label was applied loosely and it is hard to pin it to any settled convention; in this dish the tinned mushrooms and oil-packed anchovies in the sauce suggest the newer conveniences. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe has the marks of a restaurant kitchen: a large batch, a mother sauce assumed rather than explained, and garnishes that could be pulled off a shelf at any hour.