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Eggs Molet, Villeroi
Prepare a Villeroi sauce, pour in a half gill hot milk, mix well and keep hot. Boil twelve fresh eggs for five minutes, take up and plunge again in cold water for a minute, shell, arrange on a deep dish, pour the sauce over and serve.
A simple dish whose whole difficulty lies in two places: peeling twelve barely-set eggs without wrecking them, and having a Villeroi sauce loose enough to pour. The original assumes you already keep both skills on hand.
- Peel them carefully, or not at allŒufs mollets have a set white and a soft, still-liquid yolk, so the shell has almost nothing firm to come away from. Crack the wide end first and peel under a thin stream of cold running water, letting it work between shell and membrane. Eggs a week or two old release far better than same-day eggs, whatever "fresh" in the original implies.
- Five minutes is for large eggs at a rolling boilLowered into water already boiling, large eggs give a set white and fluid yolk at five minutes; straight from the refrigerator, allow closer to six. The cold-water minute stops the cooking and is not optional.
- Half a gillA gill is a quarter-pint, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces, a scant quarter cup. It is there to thin the sauce, not to flavour it.
- What Villeroi sauce isA velouté or, in most nineteenth-century versions, an allemande reduced hard with mushroom and often ham or truffle essence, rich with egg yolk and cream, cooked down until it coats a spoon heavily. It is usually made stiff enough to set on a chilled cutlet before breadcrumbing, which may be why this recipe loosens it with hot milk.
- Do not boil the finished sauceOnce the yolks are in, the sauce should be held below a simmer. A boil will curdle it into grains that whisking may not bring back.
- Serve at once, warm the dishMollet eggs go cold and the sauce skins over within minutes. Warm the deep dish, and hold the eggs in hot (not simmering) salted water until the moment of saucing if there is any delay.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a first course, or four as a light lunch dish. The recipe gives no quantity for the sauce beyond the half gill of milk; make enough to nap the eggs generously.
Sauce Villeroi is one of the older named compounds in the French repertoire, generally traced to the Villeroy family of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century French court and codified by the nineteenth-century kitchen as a thick velouté derivative used chiefly as a coating: sweetbreads, chicken wings and eggs were dipped in it, chilled until the sauce set, then crumbed and fried, and such dishes still carry the tag *à la Villeroi*. Here the sauce is simply thinned and poured. The egg itself is the point of interest — French kitchens distinguish carefully between *à la coque* (in the shell), *mollet* (shelled, yolk soft) and *dur* (hard), and the mollet egg was a standard luncheon and entrée item because it takes a sauce the way a poached egg does while being rather less fragile.