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Fried Eggs, Chasseur
Finely chop four shallots, place in a saucepan with teaspoon melted butter and gently brown for four minutes. Pour in a half gill white wine and let reduce until nearly dry, then pour in half gill tomato sauce and gill demi-glace; add six finely sliced canned mushrooms, a little chopped parsley, lightly mix, let boil for six minutes and keep hot. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in large frying pan, carefully break in twelve fresh eggs, evenly season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Fry on fire for one minute, set in oven for five minutes, remove, carefully glide on hot dish, pour sauce over and serve.
A classic hunter's-style sauce spooned over eggs fried and finished in the oven. The sauce is the work; the eggs take three minutes of attention at the end.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz), so half a gill is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, making three saltspoons 3/4 teaspoon of pepper — a lot for twelve eggs, and worth halving on a first attempt.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown veal stock thickened with espagnole, and the ingredient that makes this taste like a restaurant dish rather than eggs in tomato sauce. Good jarred or frozen demi-glace is sold now; a well-reduced brown stock will stand in, but plain beef broth will not.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe says only to set the pan in the oven for five minutes. A moderate oven (around 350F) will set the whites through while leaving the yolks soft, but check early, since the timing depends entirely on your pan and oven.
- Shallots, not browned hardFour minutes in a teaspoon of butter is meant to soften and lightly colour them. Take them past that and the wine reduction turns bitter, which is the one thing this thin sauce cannot hide.
- Canned mushroomsCanned mushrooms appear routinely in professional recipes of this period, and the recipe calls for six sliced ones. Six sliced fresh mushrooms sautéed in butter before the shallots go in give a better result and are what a chasseur sauce normally carries.
- One pan, twelve eggsTwelve eggs need a genuinely large ovenproof skillet, or the whites run together into a raft. Two 10-inch pans split between the burner and the oven are easier than one crowded one.
- Sliding the eggs out"Glide on hot dish" means keeping the sheet of eggs intact — loosen the edges with a thin spatula before tipping. The recipe pours the sauce over before serving; if you prefer, take it to the table separately so the whites do not sit and weep.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, four if it is the only savoury course.
Chasseur is French for hunter, and sauce chasseur — shallots, white wine, mushrooms, tomato and demi-glace — is traditionally explained as the sauce a hunting party's cook could build around whatever mushrooms came out of the woods. By the time Alexander Filippini compiled The International Cook Book in the first decade of the twentieth century, it had long since left the forest and become a standard of the professional brigade, applied indiscriminately to chicken, veal, kidneys and, as here, eggs. Dressing fried or poached eggs in a full-dress French sauce would have been unremarkable in the kind of restaurant kitchen Filippini knew — his career was spent principally at Delmonico's — where one imagines that eggs were cheap, demi-glace was already to hand, and a garnish and a French name turned breakfast into a menu item.