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Fried Eggs, Sauce Robert
Prepare and keep hot a Robert sauce. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a large frying pan, carefully crack in twelve fresh eggs, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, fry on fire one minute, then set in oven five minutes. Remove, carefully slide them on a large hot dish, pour the Robert sauce over them and serve.
A Delmonico's-style breakfast or supper dish: a pan of eggs set in the oven, turned out whole, and flooded with a sharp brown mustard sauce. Almost everything hinges on the sauce, which the recipe assumes you already have.
- Sauce Robert firstThe recipe presumes a finished Robert sauce is standing hot. Classically it is chopped onion sweated in butter, white wine and vinegar reduced away, demi-glace added, and Dijon mustard stirred in off the heat. The mustard must go in at the end and never boil, or it turns bitter and grainy.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon — a lot for twelve eggs, and worth halving unless you want the pepper forward against the sauce.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F, is the sensible reading; the eggs are only being set through, not browned.
- TimingOne minute on the burner plus five in the oven will, in a moderate oven, generally give firm, fully set yolks. For yolks still soft, two to three minutes in the oven is likely enough — check by tilting the pan and watching how the whites move.
- ButterA single tablespoon is thin cover for a pan wide enough to hold twelve eggs. Use enough to film the whole base generously, and use a heavy ovenproof skillet with a well-seasoned or nonstick surface if you intend the eggs to slide out in one sheet.
- Pan sizeTwelve eggs in one layer wants a 12- to 14-inch pan. In anything smaller the whites run together into a thick raft that will not cook evenly, and two batches in a 10-inch pan is the better answer.
- ServingServes six as a main course at two eggs each, or twelve as part of a larger breakfast. Sauce and dish both need to be genuinely hot; eggs shed water as they sit and will thin a demi-glace sauce quickly.
Sauce Robert is one of the oldest named sauces in the French repertoire — a "sausse Robert" is often said to appear in medieval French cookery writing, though that early attestation is disputed and much repeated at second hand, and Rabelais makes a joke of its supposed inventor in the sixteenth century, though the man behind the name has never been identified. By the time this book was written the sauce had been fixed in its modern form by professional practice: onion, white wine, vinegar, brown sauce and mustard, listed by Escoffier among the standard derivatives of demi-glace. Its appearance over fried eggs is characteristic of the grand hotel and restaurant kitchens of the period, where a batch of mother sauce stood ready all service and could be turned onto anything from pork chops to a pan of eggs. The instruction to crack twelve eggs into one pan and slide them out whole is a restaurant habit rather than a domestic one, and marks the book's origins in that world.