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Eggs Molet, Piedmontaise
Heat in a saucepan a tablespoon melted butter, add three finely chopped shallots, two ounces finely chopped lean raw ham, and gently brown for five minutes. Add a light tablespoon flour, mix well while heating for half minute, then pour in two gills demi-glace, a tablespoon sherry, six finely chopped, canned mushrooms and mix well until it comes to a boil, then boil for five minutes. Plunge twelve fresh eggs in boiling water for five minutes, take up and drop in cold water for a minute, remove, shell and place in a baking dish, pour the sauce and sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese over, set in oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
An oeuf mollet dish that lives or dies on the egg timing: five minutes gives a set white and a still-liquid yolk, and every extra minute moves it toward hard-boiled. Everything else is a straightforward brown sauce.
- The hinge: five minutes, then cold waterLower the eggs into water already at a rolling boil and start timing immediately; the brief cold-water plunge stops the cooking and loosens the shell, but it is not meant to chill them through. Peel at once, gently, under a thin stream of cold water — a five-minute egg has a fragile white and will tear if you rush.
- Two gills demi-glaceA gill is half a cup, so this is one cup of demi-glace. Bought demi-glace concentrate diluted to a cup works; so does a cup of strong reduced brown stock, though the sauce will be thinner and less glossy.
- Lean raw hamProbably uncooked cured ham — prosciutto crudo, speck or a similar dry-cured leg, cut thick and chopped, rather than deli-sliced boiled ham. Two ounces will season the sauce noticeably, so hold back on salt until the end.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. The dish only needs the cheese to melt and colour, so a hot oven (around 425F) for the five minutes stated, or a minute or two under the broiler, will do; a slower oven risks overcooking the yolks before the top browns.
- Canned mushroomsPeriod canned mushrooms were mild and already cooked. Six fresh cremini, chopped and sautéed in the butter with the shallots and ham, give more flavour — drain any liquid off before adding the flour.
- YieldTwelve eggs and a cup of sauce serve six as a first course, two eggs each. The dish does not hold: assemble and bake at the moment of serving, since the yolks continue to firm in the hot sauce.
- Baking dishUse a shallow gratin dish just large enough to hold the eggs in a single layer. Crowded or stacked, the sauce will not coat them evenly and the tops will not glaze.
Oeufs mollets — soft-boiled and shelled, then sauced — were a staple of the professional French repertoire, prized because a peeled egg with a liquid yolk can be dressed and glazed like a piece of meat. The name à la piémontaise normally signals something from Piedmont, most often a risotto base or white truffle; here the Piedmontese reference is carried instead by the raw ham, mushrooms and Parmesan folded into a demi-glace, the kind of loose regional labelling common in restaurant French of the period. The instruction to use canned mushrooms is a period marker of its own: tinned champignons were a respectable pantry item, not a compromise.