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Eggs Molet, Tomato Sauce
Boil twelve fresh eggs for five minutes, remove and plunge in cold water for one minute, then take up and shell carefully. Arrange on a deep dish, place three gills of tomato sauce in a saucepan and reduce on the range to one gill, pour the sauce over the eggs and serve.
An oeuf mollet is the awkward middle child of egg cookery: set white, liquid-to-fudgy yolk, and no shell to hold it together. The whole dish stands or falls on peeling twelve of them without tearing.
- GillsIn American usage a gill is 4 fl oz, half a US cup (the imperial gill is 5 fl oz). Three gills of tomato sauce is about 1 1/2 cups, reduced to about 1/2 cup — a third of its starting volume, so the sauce ends up thick and quite concentrated.
- The five minutes is for a particular eggFive minutes suits a room-temperature egg of about 2 oz lowered into already-boiling water. Straight from the refrigerator, large modern eggs want closer to six minutes. Test one before committing the other eleven.
- The cold plungeOne minute in cold water is enough to halt the cooking but not to make shelling easy. Ice water, and two to three minutes, gives a better chance of the membrane releasing cleanly. Very fresh eggs — the recipe insists on fresh — are notoriously the hardest to peel; eggs a week or so old shell far more willingly.
- ShellingCrack the shell all over against the counter, then peel under a thin stream of cold running water, starting at the fat end where the air pocket sits. Work gently: the white at five minutes is barely firm and will tear if you dig.
- "Reduce on the range"Simply simmer uncovered over medium heat, stirring now and then, until the volume falls by two-thirds. Reducing concentrates salt and acid along with everything else, so season at the end, not the start.
- Serve hot, and quicklyPeeled eggs shed heat fast. Warm the deep dish, hold the shelled eggs in hot (not simmering) water while the sauce reduces, drain them, and sauce them at the table's edge.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a first course, four as a light main. Halve the whole thing without changing anything but the pan size.
Oeufs mollets occupy the narrow ground between oeufs à la coque, eaten from the shell with a spoon, and hard-boiled oeufs durs — cooked just long enough that the white will stand alone once shelled, while the yolk stays soft. That single quality is often said to have made them a staple of French restaurant service in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a shelled egg is a blank base that can be set on artichoke bottoms, buried in aspic, or, as here, simply masked with a reduced sauce. The tomato sauce points to the same period's fondness for the classic sauce tomate among the mother sauces, cooked down until it clings rather than pools. A dish like this — four lines long, requiring nothing but eggs, sauce and a steady hand — is a hotel-dining-room preparation reduced to domestic scale.