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Fried Eggs, Nicoise
Heat a tablespoon good olive oil in a large frying pan, add six finely sliced cepes (dried mushrooms), six stoned, sliced olives, and lightly brown for five minutes, tossing lightly meanwhile, then add two peeled, crushed, red tomatoes. Season with half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper and three saltspoons sugar, gently toss and cook five minutes longer. Crack in twelve fresh eggs, season equally with half a teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper, then set in oven six minutes. Remove, carefully slide them on a hot dish, sprinkle a little freshly chopped parsley over and serve.
A baked-egg dish that starts on the stovetop, so the pan has to be ovenproof from the first step. The numbers are for six people, not two.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is about 3/4 teaspoon. That is 3/4 teaspoon each of white pepper and sugar in the tomato base, and another 3/4 teaspoon of pepper over the eggs — heavy by current taste, and worth halving on a first attempt.
- CepesThe recipe calls them dried mushrooms, and dried they need rehydrating: cover with hot water for 20 to 30 minutes, squeeze, slice, and keep the soaking liquid for something else. Six dried cepes is an imprecise measure — anything from a small handful upward, depending on whether they are whole caps or pieces. Fresh porcini or cremini can stand in, but they release water and want a longer, harder saute.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all; the recipe says only 'set in oven'. Six minutes for twelve eggs implies a fairly hot oven, and something around 400F is a reasonable modern guess. At that heat the whites will be just set and the yolks loose; for firm yolks expect closer to ten minutes, with some rubberiness in the whites.
- The hingeCrack the eggs in only once the tomato mixture has cooked down and stopped weeping. Watery tomatoes will thin out under the eggs and make the dish impossible to slide out whole.
- Pan and quantityTwelve eggs need a wide pan — 12 inches at minimum — or they will pile up and steam rather than set. Cast iron or a heavy ovenproof skillet works; a nonstick pan with a plastic handle does not.
- OilOne tablespoon of oil for a pan this size and twelve eggs is meagre by modern standards. Two to three tablespoons gives you a base that will actually release, and the olive oil is a large part of the flavour here.
- Sliding them outLoosen the edges with a thin spatula before tipping. If the pan is well oiled and genuinely hot when the eggs go in, the whole sheet comes away in one piece; otherwise serve straight from the pan and nobody will object.
- YieldTwelve eggs would serve about six as a lunch or supper dish with bread, though the recipe gives no number. Halve everything for three.
Nicoise in a cookbook of this period is shorthand for the standard Provencal triad of olive oil, tomato and olives, and the label was applied freely to eggs, potatoes, salads and fish alike — the tuna-and-anchovy salad we now think of first was only one member of a large family. The cepes are the odd note, and their appearance dried rather than fresh suggests a dish that could be made outside the fresh season. Baking eggs on top of a cooked vegetable base in a single pan is a familiar approach, related to the Basque piperade and the Italian uova in purgatorio; the twelve-egg quantity and the brisk, unnumbered instructions here suggest a book written for cooks working at scale rather than for a household.