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Fried Eggs with Chicken Livers
Cut eight fresh chicken livers into quarter-inch pieces. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add the livers and fry for five minutes; pour over a tablespoon sherry, half gill demi-glace season with two saltspoons salt and half saltspoon cayenne pepper, lightly mix and cook for two minutes. Lightly butter six shirred-egg dishes. Carefully crack two fresh eggs into each dish, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, evenly divided. Set in the oven for three minutes. Remove, evenly divide the preparation on top of the eggs and serve.
A Delmonico's-style breakfast dish that assumes two things a modern kitchen rarely has: individual shirred-egg dishes and a pot of demi-glace on the stove. Both are easy to work around, but the oven is where this recipe needs the most help, since it gives no temperature at all.
- Oven heat and timingNo temperature is stated; for shirred eggs use 375-400F. Three minutes will barely warm the whites in a domestic oven -- expect 6 to 10 minutes for set whites and liquid yolks, and judge by the whites rather than the clock.
- Half a gill of demi-glaceA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 2 fl oz, about 1/4 cup. Good demi-glace is sold frozen or in tubs; a reduced brown chicken or veal stock, thickened slightly, does the same job. Avoid bouillon-cube gravy, which will taste only of salt against the sherry.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of salt is 1/2 teaspoon, half a saltspoon of cayenne is 1/8 teaspoon -- which is still assertive over twelve eggs, so add it in stages.
- Total saltThe recipe calls for a full teaspoon of salt between the sauce and the eggs, before whatever the demi-glace itself contributes. Reduced demi-glace is already salty; season the sauce at the end and taste before it goes on the eggs.
- The liversFive minutes of frying plus two in the sauce will take quarter-inch pieces past pink and toward grainy. Sear them hard in a hot pan for 2 to 3 minutes, then let them finish in the sauce off high heat.
- DishesSmall gratin dishes, individual cast-iron pans or shallow ramekins all work. Butter them well and warm them in the oven before the eggs go in, which helps the whites set from below.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each -- six generous breakfast or supper servings, from eight livers, so the topping is a garnish rather than the substance of the plate.
Shirred eggs are the American name for what French kitchens call oeufs sur le plat: eggs baked and served in the same shallow dish, a format that flourished in hotel and restaurant cooking because each order could be assembled, fired and carried to the table in one vessel. The origin of the word shirred is uncertain; it is often linked to the shallow dish itself rather than to any technique, but that derivation is traditional rather than established. The recipe is written in the idiom of the New York restaurant kitchens associated with Delmonico's and with Alexander Filippini, and it shows in the assumptions: demi-glace on hand at all times, sherry used by the spoonful as a seasoning, and offal treated as a garnish for eggs rather than a dish in its own right. Chicken livers were cheap and plentiful in an era when birds arrived whole with their giblets, and pairing them with eggs was a natural piece of kitchen economy dressed up in French service.