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Eggs Molet, Soubise
Prepare a soubise sauce and keep hot until required. Boil twelve fresh eggs for five minutes, lift up and plunge them in cold water for one minute, remove, shell them and dress on hot, deep dish, pour the prepared soubise sauce over and serve.
A short entry that assumes you already own a soubise sauce and know how to time an egg. Both assumptions need a little filling in.
- The hinge is the timingMolet (properly mollet) eggs sit between soft- and hard-boiled: the white fully set, the yolk still creamy. Five minutes as directed gives a distinctly soft yolk; a little longer is usual for a large egg taken straight from the refrigerator. Small differences in time change the dish.
- Soubise sauceNot given here because the book has it elsewhere. It is a white sauce built on onion: a large quantity of sliced onion sweated in butter without colouring, cooked soft, combined with béchamel, then sieved or blended to a smooth pale purée. Season with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg, and finish with cream if it is thicker than a coating consistency.
- The cold plungeA minute in cold water checks the cooking and makes the eggs cool enough to handle without chilling them through. Shell them promptly, and they can be held in warm (not hot) water while you plate.
- Very fresh eggs peel badlyWhatever lies behind the call for "twelve fresh eggs", eggs a week or two old shell far more cleanly. With a soft yolk there is little margin for tearing the white.
- The hot deep dishA warmed deep serving dish, as the recipe specifies. The eggs are fragile and the sauce is the point, so the vessel needs enough depth to hold sauce around them rather than letting it run off.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, two eggs each. The recipe gives no quantity for the soubise; allow enough to coat the eggs generously.
- A note on runny yolksThe yolk in a mollet egg does not reach a pasteurising temperature. For anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurised shell eggs or serve the eggs hard-cooked.
Soubise is generally traced to the household of Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, a marshal of France under Louis XV, whose kitchen gave its name to a family of onion-based preparations; as with most such attributions the link is traditional rather than documented, and the sauce as codified in the nineteenth century owes more to Carême and his successors than to any eighteenth-century original. The egg itself is classified by cooking time in French practice — à la coque, mollet, dur — and the mollet egg, shelled and sauced, is often said to have suited restaurant and hotel cookery because it could be boiled in quantity in advance, held in warm water and dressed to order. Its appearance in an international collection reflects how thoroughly the French repertoire had become the professional lingua franca of American hotel kitchens, which is why the book can print a recipe consisting of little more than a timing and a sauce name and expect to be understood.