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Poached Eggs, Villeroi
Prepare a Villeroi sauce, adding to the sauce half gill hot milk to lighten a little. Prepare twelve poached eggs on toasts, pour the sauce over and serve.
This is an assembly instruction rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have the book's Villeroi sauce at hand. Everything that matters happens in the sauce and in the poaching.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup, or 4 tablespoons. The milk should be hot when it goes in, or the sauce will thin unevenly and skin over.
- What Villeroi sauce isIn the classical repertoire it is a thick allemande or velouté "finished" sauce, stiff enough to coat a chilled cutlet for breading. That is why this recipe tells you to loosen it: at working consistency it would sit on the eggs like paste rather than flow over them.
- Consistency to aim forAfter the milk goes in, the sauce should nap the back of a spoon and run slowly off it. Add the milk a spoonful at a time and stop when it flows; a Villeroi made with a lot of reduction may take less than the full quarter cup.
- Poaching the eggsBarely trembling water with a splash of vinegar, 3 minutes for a set white and liquid yolk. Use eggs as fresh as you can get, since older whites spread.
- Doing twelve at oncePoach in batches and hold the finished eggs in a bowl of water at about 140F, then drain each one hard on a towel before it meets the toast. Water carried over from the poaching pan is what turns a napped sauce into a puddle.
- The toastCut rounds or squares slightly larger than the egg and toast them dry and firm. Untoasted or steamy bread collapses under sauce within a minute.
- YieldTwelve eggs on twelve toasts would serve about six as a lunch or supper dish, or twelve at one egg each as part of a larger multi-course meal.
- TimingSauce first and kept warm over hot, not boiling, water; eggs last; plate and serve at once. Nothing about this dish improves with holding.
Sauce Villeroi is one of the older named sauces in the French repertoire, generally traced to the household of the ducs de Villeroy, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Its usual job was structural: a very thick velouté or allemande, reduced until it set on cooling, used to coat sweetbreads, cutlets or chicken wings before crumbing and frying, which is what "a la Villeroi" means on an old menu. Turning it into a pouring sauce for poached eggs, as here, is an adaptation of that thicker sauce. The compressed, referential style of the instruction is typical of Alexander Filippini, a Delmonico's man whose books were written for cooks who already knew the mother sauces and needed only to be told which one and what to do with it.