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Eggs, Pauvre Femme
Lightly butter a large baking dish, carefully crack in twelve fresh eggs, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Cut two ounces stale sandwich bread in quarter-inch-square pieces, place in a black frying pan with an ounce of butter, shuffle the pan on the fire until the bread attains a nice brown colour, then pour them over the eggs, set in the oven for five minutes, remove, pour half gill hot demi-glace over them and serve.
This is a dish of shirred eggs finished with croutons and a spoonful of brown sauce. Filippini's shorthand assumes a professional kitchen with stock and demi-glace already at hand, and it omits the oven temperature entirely.
- The hinge: eggs into a hot dishEggs into a hot dish -- Five minutes is a very short time for twelve eggs, and the recipe gives no instruction to warm the dish first. Buttering and heating the dish before cracking the eggs in will help the whites set while the yolks stay soft; in a cold dish five minutes is likely to leave the whites underdone.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given; the recipe says only "set in the oven," and the book supplies no oven term to translate. A fairly hot oven is implied by the five-minute timing. Watch them rather than the clock and pull the dish when the whites are just opaque, as they carry on setting out of the oven.
- Half a gill of demi-glaceA gill is 4 fl oz (half a cup), so half a gill is about 2 fl oz, a scant quarter cup — a light coating over the surface, not a pool. Demi-glace is reduced brown veal stock; a good jarred or frozen concentrate is the practical substitute, thinned to a light coating consistency and served hot so it does not chill the eggs.