Home › The World's Kitchen › Eggs, Omar Pasha
Eggs, Omar Pasha
Poach twelve fresh eggs. Lay two on each of six individual shirred-egg dishes and keep warm. Heat one and a half table-spoons melted butter in a small saucepan, add two tablespoons flour and thoroughly stir for one minute, then add two gills hot milk and briskly whisk until it comes to a boil. Season with half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and half saltspoon grated nutmeg, adding two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese and one raw egg yolk. Sharply whisk for two minutes, then equally divide the same over the eggs. Sprinkle half teaspoon grated Parmesan cheese over the eggs in each dish. Place in a hot oven to bake for three minutes. Remove and serve.
A Mornay-style sauce spooned over poached eggs and glazed briefly in a very hot oven. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the eggs are done, so have the dishes warm and the sauce ready to go.
- The hinge: keep the eggs softThe eggs are already cooked when they go into the dish, and the three minutes in the oven is only to set and colour the sauce. Poach to a liquid yolk and hold them in warm (not simmering) water so they do not carry on cooking.
- Gills and saltspoonsTwo gills is one cup of hot milk. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the recipe wants 1/4 teaspoon cayenne — assertive but not wrong for a cheese sauce — and 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg.
- "A hot oven"The book gives no temperature; read it as somewhere in the 425-450F range. Much cooler than that and three minutes will not colour the top. A broiler set high, with the dishes about four inches beneath, does a similar job in about two minutes and is easier to watch.
- Shirred-egg dishesSmall shallow ovenproof dishes, roughly four to five inches across — a modern gratin dish, a shallow ramekin or a cazuela all work. Depth is the enemy here; you want the sauce in a thin layer so it colours.
- The raw yolkWhisk the yolk into the sauce off the heat, after it has come to a boil and thickened, or it will scramble. The two minutes of sharp whisking is to smooth and cool the sauce slightly, not to cook the yolk further; the oven finishes it.
- Butter and flour proportions1 1/2 tablespoons butter to 2 tablespoons flour makes a fairly dry roux for one cup of milk. The sauce will be thick — closer to a coating paste than a pouring sauce — which is what you want on top of an egg. Loosen with a spoonful more milk if it will not spread.
- ParmesanGrate it fine from a block. Pre-grated cheese carries anti-caking starch and will not glaze cleanly under high heat.
- YieldSix servings, two eggs each. Half the sauce recipe is plenty for three.
Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) ranges widely over national and regional dishes, and includes a number named for nineteenth-century military and diplomatic figures in the manner of the grand hotel kitchens Filippini came out of — he spent years at Delmonico's in New York. Omar Pasha is generally taken to be Omer Pasha, the Ottoman field marshal born Mihailo Latas to a Serb family in the Croatian military frontier, who commanded Turkish forces alongside the British and French in the Crimean War and was a household name in Europe in the 1850s. Naming a garnish or a preparation after such a man was common enough; the dish itself carries no particular Ottoman or Balkan character, being a straightforward cheese-sauced oeuf poché of the French repertoire, glazed and served in individual dishes. What the name records is less a cuisine than a moment of fame.