Home › The World's Kitchen › Fried Eggs, Meyerbeer
Fried Eggs, Meyerbeer
Cut six fresh lamb kidneys in halves; skin them neatly. Cut also three sausages in two and place both in a frying pan with a tablespoon melted butter and briskly fry them for five minutes; add six canned mushrooms, six thin slices truffles, two tablespoons sherry, one and a half gills demi-glace, three saltspoons salt and one saltspoon cayenne pepper, lightly mix and let cook for five minutes. Prepare twelve fried eggs, place them on a hot dish, arrange the garnishing around, pour the sauce over and serve.
A classic French egg garnish scaled for a group: six servings of two eggs each, with a rich kidney-and-truffle ragout spooned over. Everything hinges on cooking the kidneys quickly and the sausage thoroughly, which are not the same timing.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of demi-glace is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: three-quarters of a teaspoon of salt and a scant quarter teaspoon of cayenne for the whole pan.
- The sausage needs longer than the kidneysFive minutes in the pan plus five in the sauce will not reliably bring raw sausage halves to 160F at the centre. Brown and cook the sausage through first, set it aside, then use the same pan for the kidneys so the two are not held hostage to one clock.
- Kidneys, brieflyLamb kidneys turn grainy and bitter if held over heat. Halve, snip out the white core along with the fat, and sear them hot and fast; they want to finish just pink inside. Adding them back to the sauce at the last moment is safer than simmering them in it.
- Demi-glaceClassically espagnole sauce combined with brown stock and reduced by about half, and the one component no household keeps on hand. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate works; failing that, reduce 1 1/2 cups of dark beef or veal stock to 3/4 cup and thicken lightly. Skip bouillon cubes, which will make the dish taste of salt only.
- Canned mushrooms and trufflesCanned button mushrooms are what the recipe calls for, as many period recipes do, and they give a soft, neutral result; 4 oz of fresh mushrooms browned in butter is better. Sliced black truffle is a garnish of colour and scent here rather than a structural ingredient, and a few drops of truffle oil or a spoon of truffle paste stands in without pretending otherwise.
- Fried eggs for twelveTwelve eggs will not fit one pan without the whites running together. Fry in batches in clarified butter, keep them on a warm platter, and assemble at the last minute so the yolks stay liquid under the sauce.
- ServingTwelve eggs works out to two apiece for six, though the recipe states no yield. Toast or fried bread croutons under the eggs will keep the demi-glace from pooling.
Garnishes named for composers, singers and dancers ran through French restaurant cooking of the later nineteenth century, and this one honours Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), the German-born composer whose grand operas dominated the Paris stage. Æufs Meyerbeer is a familiar classical combination — fried or shirred eggs with grilled lamb kidney and a truffled brown sauce — though the versions vary, and it appears in Escoffier's repertoire in much the same shape. Its presence in Filippini's The International Cook Book reflects where the author had spent his working life: as a chef at Delmonico's in New York, he was cooking in an American dining room that took its vocabulary, its garnishes and its prestige directly from Paris. The demi-glace and the truffles are the tell — this is restaurant cooking transcribed for a household that was expected to aspire to it.