Home › The World's Kitchen › Eggs, Tripe
Eggs, Tripe
Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, add one finely sliced onion and nicely fry five minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile; add one tablespoon flour, stir well, then pour in one gill milk and one gill cream. Mix until it comes to a boil. Add eight sliced hardboiled eggs, half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne and saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well, cook two minutes, pour into a hot deep dish and serve.
A béchamel-bound dish of sliced hard-boiled eggs, quick to assemble once the eggs are cooked. The measurements are all pre-standardization but translate cleanly.
- GillA gill is half a cup, so this is 1/2 cup milk and 1/2 cup cream — one cup of liquid against one tablespoon of flour. That is a thin sauce by modern habit; it thickens further as the eggs sit in it. If you want it to coat rather than pool, use two tablespoons flour and the same amount of butter.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Given a full quarter teaspoon of cayenne against eight eggs, this is noticeably hot; start with an eighth if you are unsure.
- Don't brown the onion"Nicely fry five minutes" means softened and translucent, not colored. Browning throws specks and a caramel note into what should be a pale, clean-tasting sauce. Keep the heat moderate.
- Cook the flourThe instruction to "stir well" after adding flour is doing real work: give it a minute over the heat before the liquid goes in, or the sauce tastes of raw starch.
- Egg timingThe eggs are already cooked, and the final two minutes is only to heat them through. Longer and the yolks go chalky and the whites squeak. Fold them in gently — sliced hard-boiled whites break easily.
- Hard-boiled eggsFor slices that hold together, eggs of about 10 minutes at a bare simmer, then cooled in water, are right. An egg slicer or a thin wet knife gives clean rounds.
- Yield and servingEight eggs serves four generously as a light supper or six as a first course. The "hot deep dish" matters: this sauce cools fast. Warm the dish and serve immediately, with toast to take up the sauce.
The odd title is a translation of the French œufs à la tripe, a dish of hard-boiled eggs sliced into an onion-scented white sauce. No tripe is involved — the name is generally explained by the appearance, the rings of sliced egg white in pale sauce resembling dressed tripe, and it appears in French household cookery well before this book was written. Its close cousin is sauce soubise, the onion-enriched béchamel named for an eighteenth-century French marshal.