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Eggs Molet, Ravigote
Boil twelve fresh eggs five minutes, take up and plunge in cold water for a minute, remove shell, and arrange on a deep dish. Pour a hot Ravigote sauce over the eggs and serve.
Two things carry this dish: the egg timing and the sauce the original never tells you how to make. Everything else is assembly.
- What mollet meansAn oeuf mollet is between soft- and hard-boiled: white fully set, yolk still creamy but not runny. Five minutes is at the short end for a large egg straight from the refrigerator; many cooks go nearer six. Test the first egg and shorten the time again if the eggs start at room temperature.
- The peeling is the hingeA five-minute egg is fragile and the shell clings. The cold-water plunge in the original at least stops the cooking, and is often said to help the white pull away from the membrane. Crack the shell all over, then peel under running water, starting at the wide end where the air pocket sits. Older eggs peel more cleanly than very fresh ones, which is at odds with the recipe's call for fresh eggs; buy them a week ahead if you can.
- Hot Ravigote sauceThe book assumes you know it. The hot version is a velouté -- a white roux loosened with veal or chicken stock -- sharpened with white wine and vinegar reduction, finished off the heat with butter and a large quantity of chopped chervil, tarragon, chives and parsley, plus shallot. It is not the cold Ravigote, which is a vinaigrette with capers and onion and would be wrong served over warm eggs.
- Do not boil the herbsAdd the chopped green herbs at the very end, off the heat. Held at a simmer they turn olive-drab and lose the sharp fresh note that gives the sauce its name.
- Keeping the eggs warmPeeled mollet eggs cool fast, and water hot enough to hold them will go on firming the yolk. If you hold them at all, keep the water well below setting temperature while you finish the sauce, drain briefly on a cloth, then dish and sauce immediately.
- The deep dishA warmed serving dish with some depth, as the original specifies: the sauce should pool around the eggs rather than run off them, and warming the dish first keeps the velout"index": 6, from setting up.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper course, two apiece, or twelve as a first course. Figure about a pint of sauce for twelve eggs.
Ravigote takes its name from the French ravigoter, to revive or perk up -- a sauce built to wake up bland foods, which is exactly what a poached or soft-boiled egg is. Classical French cookery kept two sauces under the name, a hot one on a velouté base and a cold vinaigrette version usually served with calf's head or cold meats. That a general-audience American compilation like this one prints the dish with no explanation of the sauce at all is striking, though what it tells us about the households the book was written for is a matter of speculation. The egg mollet itself was valued because it gives the richness of a runny yolk without the plate having to be a plate of soup.