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Eggs, Ravigote
Prepare twelve poached eggs. When placed on the toasts pour a hot ravigote sauce over them and serve.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in professional cookbooks of the period, where the sauce and the garnish were assumed knowledge. Almost everything that matters here is in what it leaves unsaid.
- The sauce is the dishHot ravigote is a velouté (chicken or veal stock thickened with a blond roux) finished with a reduction of white wine and white wine vinegar with shallot, then mounted with butter and finished off the heat with chopped herbs — usually chervil, tarragon and chives, with burnet in some versions. The cold ravigote of the same era is a different sauce entirely — a vinaigrette with capers, onion and herbs — and pouring it over poached eggs will not give the intended result.
- Do not boil the finished sauceOnce the herbs and butter go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer. Boiling breaks the butter emulsion and turns the fresh herbs grey and bitter. Hold it in a warm bain-marie while the eggs cook.
- Poaching the eggsWater at a bare shiver, around 180-185F, with a splash of vinegar; three minutes gives a set white and a liquid yolk. Poaching in advance and holding the eggs in cold water — a method described in professional manuals of the period — works well: reheat for 30 seconds in hot salted water and drain hard on a cloth before plating, or the water will thin the sauce.
- The toasts"The toasts" means croûtes: rounds of white bread cut to the size of the egg, trimmed of crust and either fried in clarified butter or toasted and buttered. Fried holds up better under sauce. Cut them before you poach.
- YieldTwelve eggs will serve six at two per plate, or twelve at one; the recipe does not say. Allow roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of sauce.
- HerbsBurnet is hard to find and can be dropped. Tarragon and chervil are the characteristic pair; parsley alone makes a duller sauce that is no longer really ravigote.
Ravigote comes from the French ravigoter, to revive or perk up — a name earned by its sharpness, since both the hot and cold versions are built on vinegar and a heavy hand with fresh herbs. By the nineteenth century French kitchens recognised two sauces under the name: the hot velouté-based one, which Carême and later Escoffier codified, and the cold herbed vinaigrette usually served with calf's head or cold meats. Egg dishes of this sort filled the pages of turn-of-the-century professional manuals, plausibly because hotel and club menus needed a long roster of poached-egg preparations, each distinguished only by its sauce and garnish; the recipe assumes a cook who already has stock, velouté and croûtes standing in the kitchen and needs only to be told which sauce goes with which name.