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Fried Eggs, Duxcelle
Heat in a saucepan a tablespoon butter, add half a finely chopped onion and lightly brown for five minutes; then add ten finely chopped mushrooms, pour in a tablespoon sherry, one gill demi-glace and half gill tomato sauce. Mix a little, and let boil for five minutes. Carefully crack two fresh eggs in a lightly buttered frying pan, season with a light saltspoon salt and half saltspoon white pepper, fry for three minutes, glide the eggs on a hot dish and keep hot. Proceed in a similar manner to prepare five more pairs, and when all are on the dish pour the sauce over the serve.
A garnished fried-egg dish for six, built on a classic mushroom-and-onion sauce. The sauce is made once, in full, then poured over all twelve eggs at the end.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so the sauce takes 1/2 cup demi-glace and 1/4 cup tomato sauce. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, giving a light 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon white pepper per pair of eggs.
- DuxcelleAn old spelling of duxelles, the standard finely chopped mushroom-and-shallot or onion preparation cooked down in butter. Here it is loosened into a sauce rather than reduced dry.
- Ten mushroomsThe count suggests small cultivated mushrooms, perhaps 4 to 5 oz total. Weigh rather than count, and chop fine enough that the pieces disappear into the sauce.
- Demi-glaceBrown sauce (espagnole) combined with brown stock and reduced, a professional kitchen staple when this book was written and a project today. A well-reduced homemade brown stock is the honest substitute; commercial demi-glace concentrate works but is salty, so hold back on the seasoning until the sauce has boiled.
- Cook the mushrooms dry firstThe recipe adds liquid almost at once. Letting the chopped mushrooms give up their water and start to colour before the sherry goes in is what separates a duxelles from a grey stew, and five minutes of boiling afterwards will not fix a watery start.
- Three minutes is long for an eggThat timing suits the era's taste for a set white and a barely soft yolk in a heavy pan over gentle heat. On a modern burner, two minutes covered, or basting with butter, gives the same result without rubbering the white.
- Batch and holdSix pairs cooked in sequence means the first eggs sit for several minutes. Keep the serving dish genuinely hot and slightly undercook the earliest batches. The sauce, poured over at the last moment, does the rest.
- YieldTwelve eggs, six servings, with the single quantity of sauce spread across the whole dish rather than made per portion.
Duxelles is generally traced to the seventeenth-century French kitchen and the household of the Marquis d'Uxelles, whose cook La Varenne is traditionally credited with the mixture, though the attribution is repeated far more often than it is documented. What is clear is that by the time this book was compiled the preparation was a fixture of the professional repertoire, a way of concentrating cheap mushrooms into something intensely savoury for stuffings, garnishes and sauces. Its appearance here, married to demi-glace and served over fried eggs, is characteristic of the restaurant and hotel cooking of the period, in which fried or poached eggs were routinely named for the sauce poured over them.