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Fried Eggs, Finnoise
Finely chop one medium, green pepper and place it in a saucepan with one tablespoon melted butter and gently cook for two minutes without browning; then add two gills hot tomato sauce; lightly stir and let reduce to half; add half ounce good butter, bit by bit; stir till the butter is thoroughly melted, then shift the pan to the corner of the range.
Prepare twelve fried eggs. After the eggs have been dressed on the dish pour the above sauce over and serve.
A short pepper-and-tomato sauce finished with butter, spooned over fried eggs. The only technical demands are the reduction and the butter mounting, and the recipe scales down cleanly.
- The hinge: mount the butter off the heatMounting the butter -- The recipe adds the half ounce of butter bit by bit and stirs until it is melted, then shifts the pan to the cooler corner of the range. Keep the heat gentle at this stage: a sauce boiled hard after the butter goes in will separate into an oily film rather than staying glossy.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of hot tomato sauce, reduced down to about half a cup. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- "The corner of the range"On a coal range the corner was the coolest spot, used to hold food warm without further cooking. The modern equivalent is the lowest burner setting or simply off the heat with a lid ajar.
- Green pepperThis means a fresh sweet bell pepper, not a chile. Sweat it in the butter over low heat until it softens and turns dull green with no browning; browning turns the sauce bitter and muddies the color.
- Tomato sauceThe book assumes a house tomato sauce already made and simmering. Plain passata or a smooth canned tomato sauce works; skip anything heavily seasoned with garlic and herbs, which will bury the pepper.
- Fried eggsFilippini does not say how the eggs are fried; in books of this period the term covers both eggs cooked gently in butter and eggs fried in hotter fat. Whichever you use, set them on a warm dish and sauce them just before serving.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six at two eggs each. For two people, take about a third of everything: one small pepper, a third of a cup of tomato sauce reduced by half, and a teaspoon of finishing butter.
Alexander Filippini worked for decades at Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book reflects the classical French repertoire as it was practiced in American hotel kitchens in the early twentieth century. Nineteenth-century French menu language attached national adjectives loosely, sometimes on no firmer basis than an ingredient a chef associated with a distant place. The dish belongs to a large family of egg preparations in books of this era, where a cook was expected to have a tomato sauce and a stock at hand and could produce a named dish by combining them with one distinguishing element. The butter worked in at the end is the classic monter au beurre finish that gives such sauces their shine.