Home › The World's Kitchen › Eggs, Muzaffer-Ed Din
Eggs, Muzaffer-Ed Din
Remove the galls from six white chicken livers and place them in a bowl. Season with half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper, half saltspoon grated nutmeg and one saltspoon ground mixed allspice; pour in a half gill sherry and tablespoon rum, add half teaspoon finely chopped parsley and quarter bean finely chopped garlic; turn well in the seasoning and let infuse in a cool place for thirty minutes. Place in a saucepan, cover it and let cook for fifteen minutes, then transfer to a mortar and thoroughly pound to a paste. Rub through a sieve into a saucepan; pour in one and a half gills demi-glace, add one small, finely chopped truffle and let boil for eight minutes, lightly mixing meanwhile. Evenly divide this preparation into six egg-cocotte dishes, carefully crack two fresh eggs into each dish, season with a half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper, evenly divided. Pour a teaspoon cream on top of each dish, place on a tin, set in the oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
A Delmonico's-style egg cocotte built on a spiced chicken-liver purée. Nearly everything here is workable in a modern kitchen; the measurements and the oven time are what need translating.
- The unitsA gill is half a cup, so a half gill of sherry is 1/4 cup and one and a half gills of demi-glace is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon.
- GallsThe gall is the greenish bile sac attached to the liver, and any liver stained by it is bitter beyond saving. Livers sold today are almost always trimmed, but check each lobe and cut away any green-tinged flesh.
- "White" liversPale, firm livers, generally taken as the mark of a well-fed bird and preferred for a mild flavour and a smooth puree. Darker, bloodier livers tend to give a coarser, stronger paste.
- Cooking the liversFifteen minutes covered in a dry saucepan means they steam in their own juices and the wine. Take them off while the centres are still faintly rosy; livers pushed past that turn grainy and no amount of pounding or sieving will fix it.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but do not skip the sieve. Forcing the paste through a fine drum sieve or chinois is what makes the difference between a smooth base and a gritty one.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown veal-and-espagnole sauce, once a standing item in any professional kitchen. Good chilled demi-glace or a heavily reduced brown stock will stand in; canned gravy will not, since the whole seasoning of the dish rests on it.
- Oven heat and timeNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 350-375F, is a reasonable modern reading. Note that the recipe says only to set the dishes on a tin; it does not call for a water bath, though many cocotte preparations of the period do use one.
- Five minutes is not enoughFive minutes looks short -- Two whole eggs per dish will probably need longer than five minutes in a domestic oven, though the base goes in hot from the pan, which speeds matters. Judge by eye rather than the clock: pull them when the whites are just opaque and the yolks still loose, a shade early, since they carry on cooking in the hot china.
- Dish size and yieldTwo eggs plus a share of purée and cream need a cocotte of about 6 fl oz; ordinary small ramekins will overflow. Serves six as a first course.
- SaltThe half teaspoon of salt at the egg stage is divided across all six dishes, not per dish, and the demi-glace is already seasoned. Season lightly and taste the purée before it goes into the cocottes.
The name almost certainly refers to Mozaffar ad-Din, Shah of Persia from 1896 to 1907, who travelled to Europe several times during his reign; the attribution rests on the name alone, and if the source volume predates 1896 the reference would be to him before his accession. Naming a dish for a foreign dignitary was common in the grand restaurant kitchens of the period, and nothing in the seasoning or method departs from the French repertoire. The dish itself is a standard oeufs en cocotte: eggs baked in individual china pots over a savoury base, a formula that recurs across professional cookbooks of the era with the garnish changed and the name with it. The chicken-liver puree bound with demi-glace and studded with truffle is characteristic of the Escoffier-era hotel kitchen.