Home › The World's Kitchen › Fried Eggs, Colbert
Fried Eggs, Colbert
Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan and carefully crack in twelve fresh eggs. Evenly season with half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, fry for one minute, then set in oven for five minutes. Remove, carefully slide on a large hot dish, pour a Colbert sauce over and serve.
A Delmonico's-style breakfast dish: a dozen eggs cooked flat in one pan, finished in the oven, and sauced. The only real difficulty is scale.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is about three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper for twelve eggs. That is a firmly peppery dish by modern taste; halve it if you prefer.
- ButterA tablespoon and a half will not cover the base of a pan wide enough to hold twelve eggs. Use enough to film the whole surface generously, or work in two pans.
- Pan sizeTwelve eggs in a single layer wants a 14-inch skillet or a shallow ovenproof gratin dish. Crack each egg into a cup first and slide it in, so a broken yolk does not spoil the arrangement.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; ranges of the period rarely offered a reliable way to state one. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, should set the whites in about the five minutes stated while leaving the yolks soft; the pan goes in already hot from the stovetop minute.
- Colbert sauceColbert here most likely means beurre Colbert: softened butter worked with meat glaze or reduced veal stock, lemon juice, chopped parsley and tarragon, spooned over so it melts on contact. Treated as a compound butter it should not be boiled, or it breaks.
- Sliding outThe eggs are meant to arrive as one sheet. Loosen the edge with a wide spatula and tip the pan rather than lifting; if the pan is not well seasoned or nonstick, cook them in a buttered gratin dish and serve from it.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a breakfast or luncheon course, two eggs each, with the sauce.
Anything called Colbert in a turn-of-the-century kitchen points back to the classical French repertoire and, by tradition, to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, whose name was attached to a compound butter of meat glaze, lemon and tarragon and to the sole that is boned, breaded and filled with it. Nineteenth-century French cooking named garnishes after statesmen and financiers as a matter of course, and the names traveled to America intact with the chefs who used them. This book belongs to that transfer. The eggs are started on the range and finished in the oven, rather than flipped.