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Poached Eggs, Seville
Cut into small julienne strips one small carrot, one medium white onion, one green pepper, and place in a small saucepan with half teaspoon salt and one saltspoon pepper, adding one gill cold water and a tablespoon butter; mix well, cover with a sheet of lightly buttered paper, then set in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove, lift up the paper, add six sliced heads canned mushrooms and six cooked shrimps cut into halves. Moisten with one and a half gills demi-glace and half gill tomato sauce. Mix well and let boil for five minutes. Arrange twelve poached eggs, prepared, on a large dish. Pour the sauce over and serve.
A vegetable braise turned into a warm sauce for poached eggs, from the era when demi-glace sat ready in every professional kitchen. The whole dish comes together quickly once the sauce base exists.
- Demi-glace is the hingeOne and a half gills is three-quarters of a cup of true reduced brown sauce, and there is no shortcut that tastes the same. Use a good homemade brown sauce reduced with veal stock, or a quality commercial demi-glace concentrate diluted to sauce consistency; a thin canned gravy will leave the dish watery and flat.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so the braise starts with half a cup of water and finishes with three-quarters cup demi-glace plus a quarter cup tomato sauce. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, around 350F, will do for twenty minutes of gentle braising; the vegetables should soften without colouring.
- The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the vegetables. It traps steam and keeps the julienne moist with very little liquid. Foil works but seals too tightly.
- Canned mushrooms"Six sliced heads canned mushrooms" means six whole button caps from the tin, sliced. Six fresh cremini or button mushrooms, sliced and added at the same point, are better and need the full five-minute boil to lose their rawness.
- Shrimp timingThe shrimp go in already cooked and get only five minutes of simmering, which is about the limit before they tighten. If starting from raw, poach them briefly first and add them in the last minute of the sauce's cooking.
- Poaching twelve eggs'Prepared' most likely points to the book's basic poached-egg method, and poaching ahead is the practical route: poach the eggs, slip them into cold water, then reheat briefly in hot salted water and drain on a towel just before saucing. Doing twelve to order at once is difficult.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, two eggs each. The sauce quantity is generous for that number.
The name points at Seville, though the construction is thoroughly French: a julienne braised under paper, bound with demi-glace, and used to dress poached eggs in the manner catalogued by Escoffier and his contemporaries under dozens of place names. In that system a garnish called andalouse generally signals sweet pepper and tomato, the two ingredients that most reliably stood for Spain in a Paris kitchen, and both appear here. The International Cook Book (1906) was assembled by Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, and its pages on foreign dishes are less a survey of foreign cooking than a record of how a great American restaurant of the period labelled its dishes: a French method, a regional flourish, and a foreign name on the menu card. The reliance on a pot of demi-glace standing ready is the clearest sign of its origin; the recipe never pauses to explain it.