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Fried Eggs, Italienne
Prepare an Italian sauce and keep hot. Crack two fresh eggs in a lightly buttered frying pan, season with a light saltspoon salt and half saltspoon pepper and fry on the range for one minute only; carefully glide them into a baking dish, then proceed to prepare five more portions in the very same way. When all are on the dish pour the sauce over, then sprinkle a tablespoon Parmesan cheese over all, set in the oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
A quick composed egg dish that depends almost entirely on a sauce the recipe assumes you already have. Read it as an assembly method rather than a self-contained recipe.
- The sauce comes firstSauce Italienne in a book of this vintage is a brown sauce — demi-glace or a reduced meat gravy — finished with finely chopped mushrooms (duxelles), shallot, a little tomato and chopped parsley, sharpened with white wine. It has to be made and kept hot before a single egg is cracked, because the dish is finished in minutes.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the seasoning is a scant 1/4 teaspoon salt and about 1/8 teaspoon pepper per two eggs, which is generous; season lightly and let the sauce carry the rest.
- YieldSix portions of two eggs each, twelve eggs in all. The recipe does not say why the eggs are fried two at a time.
- One minute means barely setSixty seconds in a buttered pan sets the white at the edges and leaves the yolk raw. That is deliberate — the five minutes in the oven under hot sauce finishes them. If you fry them until the whites are firm, the finished dish will have chalky yolks.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A hot oven is what the five-minute instruction implies; the point is to glaze the cheese and heat the sauce through, not to cook the eggs further.
- Gliding them into the dishUse a wide, shallow buttered gratin dish and slide each pair off the pan without stacking or overlapping. Eggs that sit on top of one another will not heat evenly in five minutes.
- The cheese is a dustingOne tablespoon of Parmesan across twelve eggs is a whisper. Grate it finely so it melts rather than sitting in grains; a little more will not hurt if the sauce is robust.
- ServingBring it to the table in the baking dish and serve immediately — the yolks continue to firm as it stands. A luncheon or supper dish, with bread to take up the sauce.
Filippini's International Cook Book gathers dishes from restaurant kitchens and attaches national tags to individual preparations, which is why a plate of eggs earns the label "Italienne." In classical French practice the tag rarely means the dish is Italian; it means the sauce is italienne, one of the small brown sauces codified in nineteenth-century French kitchens, built on demi-glace with mushrooms, shallots and tomato. The Parmesan and the brief gratin he sauce's origins do. The method itself — eggs half-cooked in a pan, then arranged, sauced and flashed in the oven — is a hotel kitchen technique for putting six identical plates out at once.