Home › The World's Kitchen › Eggs, Murphy
Eggs, Murphy
Finely chop half a seeded green pepper, place it in a sautoire with a tablespoon melted butter and nicely brown for three minutes. Pour in a half pint tomato sauce and let it reduce on the fire to one gill, then add little by little a half ounce fresh butter, sharply mixing meanwhile. Evenly divide the puree in six egg-cocotte dishes, carefully crack two fresh eggs in each dish, season with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Evenly spread over a half teaspoon fennel or chopped tarragon, pour a tablespoon cream over eggs in each dish, set in oven to bake for five minutes, remove and serve.
A French œufs en cocotte in all but name, dressed with a reduced tomato-and-green-pepper purée. The original assumes a professional range and gives no oven temperature, and its five-minute bake is far too short for twelve eggs in cold ramekins.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow pan; any 8-inch skillet or sauté pan does the job. Nothing about the vessel is essential here beyond a wide surface for reducing the sauce.
- A gill and a half pintA gill is half a cup, a half pint is one cup. So the tomato sauce is reduced by half, to about 4 fl oz total, which divided among six dishes is about four teaspoons apiece — a thin layer under the eggs, not a pool.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of pepper spread across twelve eggs. The half teaspoon of salt is likewise for the whole batch, not per dish.
- Egg-cocotte dishesSmall straight-sided porcelain ramekins, roughly 4 oz. Two eggs will only fit comfortably in a 5- to 6-oz ramekin; use the larger size and butter it well.
- Oven and timeBake at 375F. Five minutes will not set twelve eggs from cold — expect 12 to 16 minutes for whites that are just firm and yolks still soft, and start checking at 10. Setting the ramekins in a roasting pan of hot water halfway up their sides keeps the whites tender instead of rubbery at the edges.
- Mounting the butterThe half ounce of butter (one tablespoon) is whisked in off a hard boil, in small pieces, to thicken and gloss the reduction. If the sauce boils hard after the butter goes in, it will separate.
- FennelFresh fennel fronds, not the bulb or the seed. Tarragon is the more reliable partner for eggs and tomato if fronds are hard to come by.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each: six people as a first course or light lunch, with toast. Carry-over heat keeps cooking the eggs in the hot ramekins, so serve them the moment they come out.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef and manager at Delmonico's in New York, filled his books with dishes tagged to names — patrons, colleagues, public figures — and "Murphy" here may well be one of those dedications rather than any Irish connection; the dish itself is straightforwardly French. Eggs baked in individual porcelain cocottes were a hotel and restaurant staple of the period precisely because they could be assembled in advance, slid into the oven to order, and sent to the table in the dish they cooked in, which kept them hot across a long dining room. The green pepper and tomato give it an American accent, a touch of local produce set into classical French technique.