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Poached Eggs En Surprise
Plunge six medium, sound, green peppers in boiling water for two minutes, lift up and skin with a coarse towel; cut out a small piece at bottom of each, and through it scoop them out entirely without disturbing the sides. Place in six individual pudding moulds, cut side upward, one in each. Heat a teaspoon butter in a frying pan, add half a chopped small white onion and brown for three minutes, then add three finely chopped, well-cleaned, fresh mushrooms and cook for three minutes more; moisten with a gill demi-glace and reduce on the fire for five minutes; add two tablespoons bread crumbs. Stir while cooking for one minute, remove and let cool off. Lightly line the inside of the peppers with this preparation, crack an egg into each pepper, season each one with a saltspoon salt and half saltspoon pepper. Arrange the cut-away piece of peppers on top. Place the moulds in a frying pan, pour in hot water up to half the height of the moulds, place in the oven to bake for six minutes. Remove, unmould on a dish, pour a gill hot demi-glace around them and serve.
An early twentieth-century restaurant conceit: a bell pepper hollowed out, lined with mushroom duxelles, and used as a mould for a baked egg. Most of the work is in the peppers; the timing is the part that needs revising.
- The peppers"Green peppers" here are ordinary green bell peppers; the recipe specifies medium ones, and whichever you use has to sit upright in the mould. Two minutes in boiling water loosens the skin only a little; a modern cook may get a cleaner result by blistering them under a broiler and slipping the skins off, so long as the walls stay firm enough to hold an egg.
- Scooping without breaching the sidesThis is the hinge. Cut the plug from the bottom (the pointed end), take out the core and seeds through that opening, and leave the shoulders and stem end intact — the pepper is the cooking vessel, and a split wall lets the egg run out into the mould.
- A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fl oz. The recipe calls for one gill in the duxelles and another to sauce the finished dish, so budget a full cup of demi-glace.
- Demi-glaceA reduction of brown veal stock and sauce espagnole; in the professional kitchens of the period it was generally kept ready. Good jarred demi-glace or a well-reduced dark veal or beef stock works; a thin stock will not cling to the crumbs or coat the plate.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. So each egg gets about 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper, which is generous — half that is plenty for one egg.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given; a moderate oven, somewhere around 325-350F, is a reasonable reading of an unqualified bake in a water bath. Use a shallow baking dish rather than a frying pan, with the water hot when it goes in, and keep it below a simmer so it does not rock the moulds.
- Six minutes is far too shortAn egg inside a cold pepper inside a mould inside a water bath heats slowly. Expect 15 to 20 minutes at 350F for a set white and a soft yolk; check one at 12 minutes and judge by the white, not the clock. Pull them while the yolk still moves, as carryover heat continues in the mould.
- Unmoulding and yieldLet the moulds stand a minute out of the water, run a knife round the rim, and invert onto the plate — the cut plug ends up underneath, so replace it on top if you want the trompe-l'oeil whole pepper. Serves six as a first course or light lunch.
The dish belongs to an era when a first course was expected to conceal itself: something "en surprise" hid one familiar food inside another, and the reveal came at the table. Its working parts are pure French professional kitchen — a duxelles of onion and mushroom bound with crumbs, and demi-glace both inside and around — grafted onto the sweet pepper, which reached fashionable European cookery from the Americas by way of Spain and Italy and had become common enough in American markets to be treated as a mould rather than a novelty. Books like this one collected such hybrids by the dozen: restaurant technique written out for a household cook who was assumed to have stock reduction on hand.