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Eggs, Renauldt
Skin and slice very fine three small uncooked country sausages. Heat in a frying pan one tablespoon butter, add the sausages and quickly cook for three minutes. Lightly butter six cocotte egg dishes, then equally divide the sausages into them. Crack two fresh eggs into each dish. Season with half saltspoon salt and half saltspoon white pepper (each dish). Pour over the eggs one tablespoon hot tomato sauce; spread a light teaspoon grated Parmesan cheese over each; place on a tin and set in the oven to bake for five minutes. Remove and send to the table.
A dish of eggs baked in individual dishes, of the sort a hotel kitchen could put up quickly to order. The original omits the oven temperature, which is the one thing you need to supply.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was usual in period cookbooks. Baked eggs of this type want about 400F; five minutes at that heat sets the whites and leaves the yolks loose, so check at four and give them a minute or two more if the whites are still translucent.
- Cocotte dishesSmall straight-sided porcelain or earthenware dishes, one per serving, and large enough to take two eggs with sausage and sauce. Standing them on a tin, as directed, makes them easier to move and slows the heat reaching the bases; a shallow water bath does the same job more gently.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Half a saltspoon is therefore about an eighth of a teaspoon of salt and the same of white pepper per dish, which is modest for two eggs.
- Country sausageFresh pork sausage, coarsely ground and usually seasoned with sage and pepper. Bulk breakfast sausage is the closest supermarket equivalent; if you buy links, slit the casing and discard it as the recipe directs rather than slicing through it.
- Cook the sausage throughThree minutes in butter browns thin slices but will not reliably cook raw pork, and the five minutes in the oven is aimed at the eggs, not the meat. Fry the sausage until no pink remains before it goes into the dishes.
- Tomato sauceA plain cooked tomato sauce, added hot so it does not chill the dishes and stall the baking. Use about a tablespoon per dish and keep it thin enough to pour; a thick paste will sit on the whites and slow them setting.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each, so six servings, and it wants twelve eggs. Halve or third the quantities freely, since the method is per-dish.
Eggs baked in small individual dishes are the French œufs en cocotte, and the name is generally traced to the vessel: cocotte for a small covered pot. Names like "Renauldt" are usually said to belong to the restaurant convention of the period, in which a standard preparation was distinguished from its neighbours in the menu by the name of a chef, a patron or a house rather than by a description of its contents. The technique suited hotel service well, since the dishes could be filled in advance along a line and finished to order in a few minutes, and the same logic carried it into American breakfast and luncheon cookery, where it appears alongside the closely related shirred eggs.