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Fried Eggs, Valencienne
Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a black frying pan. Carefully crack in twelve fresh eggs. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper; fry on range one minute, then set in oven five minutes. Remove, carefully slide them on a large hot dish. Prepare stewed tomatoes adding to them six sliced mushrooms and one sweet pepper cut in small squares, mix well five minutes, pour over the eggs and serve.
A shirred-egg dish that starts on the burner and finishes in the oven, then goes under a warm tomato garnish. The whole thing hinges on not overcooking the eggs, since they keep setting on the hot dish and again under the sauce.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon. That is generous for twelve eggs; start with less if your pepper is fresh.
- The "black frying pan"This means a heavy cast-iron or blued-steel pan, prized because it moved from range to oven and held even heat. Any oven-safe skillet works, but twelve eggs will not fit in one 10-inch pan without crowding into a single mass. Use two pans or a shallow oven dish, halving the butter accordingly.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, should set the whites in roughly five minutes while leaving the yolks soft; much hotter and the bottoms are likely to toughen before the tops set.
- Judging donenessPull the pan when the whites are just opaque and the yolks still wobble. Carryover heat on the hot serving dish, plus the hot tomatoes poured over, will finish them.
- Sliding them outCooked as a single sheet, the eggs come out most cleanly if the pan is well buttered and you loosen the edge with a thin spatula first. Serving straight from the skillet is a reasonable alternative to the "large hot dish."
- Stewed tomatoesThe book assumes you have its own stewed tomatoes to hand. Roughly: a can or two of whole tomatoes broken up and simmered down with a little butter, salt and sugar until thick enough not to flood the plate. Watery tomatoes will ruin the dish.
- Mushrooms and pepperFive minutes in the tomatoes will not cook raw mushrooms or a raw sweet pepper through. Saute both in butter first, then fold them into the hot tomatoes for the final few minutes.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, with bread to catch the sauce.
"Valencienne" on a menu of this period is French kitchen shorthand for a garnish in the Spanish manner: tomato, sweet pepper, sometimes rice or saffron, generally traced to Valencia rather than the French town of Valenciennes. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century restaurant cookery labelled dishes by their garnish, so the same fried eggs could be sent out as Valencienne with tomato and pepper, or under a dozen other regional names with a different accompaniment; the technique never changed, only the spoonful on top. Filippini's International Cook Book gathered these garnish-names by the hundred, which is why so many of its entries assume you already know the base preparations, in this case the stewed tomatoes it never repeats here.