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Eggs, Strasbourgeoise
Boil twelve fresh eggs for eight minutes, plunge in cold water for one minute, take up, shell, cut in quarters and keep on a plate. Skin four country sausages, place meat in mortar with a tablespoon pate de foie gras and pound to a pulp. Remove and divide the paste into hazelnut-sized balls, place in a sautoir with two tablespoons each sherry and demi-glace then cook for five minutes. Add eggs with a half teaspoon each chopped parsley and salt, three saltspoons pepper, and gently mix. Cover sautoire, set in oven for ten minutes, remove, dress on a hot, deep dish and serve.
A hot egg dish from the classical French repertoire, built on two things the original assumes you have on hand: demi-glace and foie gras. Neither is negotiable in flavour terms, but both can be handled sensibly.
- The hinge: cook the sausage balls throughThe five minutes in the sautoir plus ten in the oven is enough only if the balls really are hazelnut-sized. Pounded raw pork should reach 160F; make the balls no larger than a hazelnut, and note that with the sherry and demi-glace in the pan they are simmering rather than frying, so give them the full five minutes before the eggs go in.
- SautoirA straight-sided shallow saute pan with a lid. Any ovenproof skillet with a cover works, so long as it is wide enough to hold the egg quarters in something close to a single layer.
- SaltspoonAbout a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is roughly three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper for twelve eggs. That is assertive by modern taste; start with half and adjust at the end.
- Oven heatThe recipe says only "set in oven" and gives no temperature, as was normal for the period. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable working choice; much hotter will toughen the whites and dry the yolks.
- Country sausagesPlain fresh pork sausage, coarsely ground, seasoned with little more than salt, pepper and perhaps sage. Avoid anything sweetened, smoked or heavily spiced. The recipe gives no weight for the four sausages, so judge by eye against a tablespoon of pate.
- Pate de foie grasA tablespoon of the smooth potted kind, not seared lobes of liver. A good pork or chicken liver pate is the honest substitute; the point is the fatty liver richness binding the sausage meat.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thick enough to coat a spoon. Two tablespoons of a strong homemade reduction, or a good commercial demi-glace concentrate loosened with water, will do what the original intends: bind the sherry into a glossy coating.
- Egg timingEight minutes gives whites that are set but yolks still slightly moist at the centre, which is what you want when the quarters go back into a warm oven. The minute in cold water is for shelling, not full chilling, so peel promptly.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six generously as a lunch or supper dish, or eight as part of a larger meal. It does not reheat well; the whites turn rubbery.
"A la strasbourgeoise" in classical French cookery is shorthand for foie gras, and sometimes for the braised sauerkraut that goes with it in Alsace. Strasbourg's primacy in the fattened-goose-liver trade is generally traced to the eighteenth century, and by the time this book appeared its name on a menu told a diner exactly which luxury to expect. The dish itself belongs to a large family of hot egg preparations that filled the middle of the menu, where hard-boiled eggs were treated as a base to be enriched rather than a plain thing in themselves; the pounding of sausage meat and pate in a mortar is the older technique that the food processor eventually replaced. That it sits in a chapter called The World's Kitchen says something about the period's geography of food: a French classical garnish, named for a German-speaking city, presented to American readers as an international specialty.