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Eggs, Point Du Jour
Lightly butter six-cleaned individual shirred egg dished. Break two fresh eggs into each dish. Divide half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper among them evenly. Place in oven for five minutes. Remove, arrange a very thin slice of truffle on top of each egg yolk and serve.
A two-line luxury breakfast that depends almost entirely on oven temperature and on stopping at the right moment. The original omits the heat, which is the one thing you need to supply.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given in the original. Use 375-400F; hotter than that browns the whites before the yolks warm through, cooler than that dries them out over a long bake.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of white pepper spread across six dishes. With half a teaspoon of salt as well, that is roughly a pinch of each per dish.
- Shirred egg dishesSmall shallow ovenproof dishes, what a modern kitchen calls a gratin dish, cocotte or wide ramekin, about 4 to 5 inches across. Two eggs need to sit in a single layer; deep ramekins steam the whites instead of setting them.
- Preheat the dishesButter the dishes and warm them in the oven for a minute before the eggs go in. Cold ceramic can leave shirred eggs with translucent whites under set yolks.
- Five minutes is the floor, not the ruleFive minutes at 400F gives barely set whites and liquid yolks. Check at five and give it another one to three minutes if the whites still look glassy; the dishes carry enough heat to keep cooking on the way to the table.
- TruffleThe original specifies only a very thin slice of truffle; black winter truffle shaved paper thin is the likely intention. Preserved truffle in a jar is the realistic substitute and should be sliced and laid on at the last second, since its aroma is volatile. Truffle oil or truffle paste is a different dish, not a cheaper version of this one.
- YieldSix dishes, twelve eggs, six servings. Everything must go into the oven at once and come out at once, so cook only as many dishes as your oven holds in a single layer.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, the work of a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it is typical of the book's habit of attaching a French place name to a simple preparation. Point du Jour means "break of day" and is the name of a district on the Seine at the western edge of Paris; the garnish name is generally taken as a nod to that quarter rather than to any documented invention there, and the sense of daybreak suits a breakfast dish. Shirred eggs, baked in their own small dish and brought to the table in it, were a fixture of hotel and club breakfast menus around 1900 precisely because they could be assembled to order and finished in minutes. The thin slice of truffle on each yolk is the whole point of the recipe: an otherwise plain baked egg becomes a luxury course by way of a single ingredient, which is how a great deal of turn-of-the-century restaurant cooking earned its prices.