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Eggs, Robert
Lightly butter six shirred-egg dishes, crack two fresh eggs into each dish. Evenly season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Set in oven two minutes. Bring dishes to oven door. Divide a Robert sauce over them equally and reset in oven two minutes longer. Remove and serve.
A Delmonico's-style breakfast dish: shirred eggs finished with sauce Robert, the mustard-and-onion brown sauce. Everything depends on having the sauce made and hot before the eggs go anywhere near the oven.
- Make the sauce firstSauce Robert is a separate preparation — brown sauce or demi-glace simmered with onion sweated in butter, white wine and vinegar, finished off the heat with Dijon mustard. It must be hot and ready, because the eggs give you no waiting time. Mustard added to a boiling sauce turns bitter, so stir it in at the end with the pan off the flame.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is about 3/4 teaspoon of pepper. Spread over twelve eggs that is aggressive by modern taste; half that is plenty, especially with a mustard sauce coming.
- Shirred-egg dishesSmall shallow oval gratin dishes or individual ramekins, one per person. Butter them and let them heat in the oven for a minute before the eggs go in, or the whites sit on cold china and set unevenly.
- Oven heatThe recipe names no temperature; the very short times imply a hot oven, which is right for eggs cooked flat in a shallow dish. Set the rack in the upper third.
- The timing will not workTwo minutes, sauce, two minutes more is far too short outside a restaurant range that never cools. Expect more like 6 to 10 minutes total in a hot oven: pull the dishes when the whites are opaque all the way through and the yolks still tremble, adding the sauce in the last couple of minutes so it warms without drying.
- Where the sauce goesThe recipe says to divide the sauce over the eggs; if you prefer to judge the yolks, spoon it around the whites and over the edges instead, since a covered yolk is one you cannot check for doneness.
- YieldSix servings of two eggs each. Serve in the dishes they cooked in, on plates, with toast; they carry on cooking from residual heat, so go straight to the table.
Sauce Robert is one of the oldest named sauces still in the French repertoire — Rabelais refers to it in the sixteenth century, and the name is traditionally attributed to a cook called Robert Vinet, though that attribution is folklore rather than documented fact. By the time Escoffier codified the kitchen it had settled into its modern form: a derivative of espagnole, sharpened with onion, wine, vinegar and mustard, and served most often with pork. Pairing it with eggs baked in individual dishes is a hotel-dining-room move of the same era, when a well-run kitchen had brown sauce standing on the stove all day and could turn a two-egg breakfast into something worth a menu name simply by spooning a ladleful over it. That is the logic of this whole family of shirred-egg recipes: the eggs are a blank, and the sauce is the dish.]}