Home › The World's Kitchen › Shirred Eggs, Allemande
Shirred Eggs, Allemande
Mix in a small saucepan one tablespoon of butter with two tablespoons flour, heat for half minute, then pour in one pint white broth. Season with half saltspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper and half saltspoon grated nutmeg, continually mix until it comes to a boil, then reduce to a half the quantity. Mix on a plate one raw egg yolk with a tablespoon cream and the juice of half a lemon and add to the sauce; mix well while heating for one minute, strain the sauce through a cheesecloth into another saucepan and keep hot. Lightly butter six shirred-egg dishes. Carefully crack two fresh eggs into each dish, equally season with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Set in the oven for three minutes, remove, pour the sauce over them equally and serve.
A velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison, poured over baked eggs. The sauce is the work; the eggs are a three-minute job in the original, which is optimistic.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So half a saltspoon of salt is about an eighth of a teaspoon, and two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon.
- White brothA pale unbrowned stock, traditionally veal or chicken with no roasted bones and no tomato. Any light chicken stock works; avoid dark or heavily reduced commercial concentrates, which will muddy the colour.
- The roux stays whiteHalf a minute over the heat is deliberate. The flour should lose its raw edge without taking any colour, or the finished sauce will be beige rather than ivory.
- Reduce by halfA pint of broth cooks down to about a cup, which is roughly two and a half tablespoons of sauce per dish. Reducing a flour-thickened sauce takes patience and frequent stirring; it catches easily.
- The liaison must not boilThis is the hinge. Once the yolk and cream go in, the sauce holds only below a simmer. One minute of gentle heat is right, and the straining through cheesecloth at the end is insurance against any yolk that has already set.
- Oven and timingNo temperature is given; 375F is appropriate for shirred eggs. Three minutes will leave the whites largely liquid. Expect 8 to 12 minutes for set whites and soft yolks, depending on the dish, and note that eggs served this way remain soft-yolked.
- Shirred-egg dishesShallow individual ovenproof dishes, much like a small gratin dish. Anything wide and low that holds two eggs in a single layer will do; a deep ramekin steams rather than bakes them.
- YieldSix dishes, twelve eggs, six servings as a lunch or supper course.
Sauce allemande is the classical velouté finished with a liaison of egg yolk, cream and lemon, and despite its name it was codified in French kitchens rather than German ones. Carême discussed it at length, and later cooks grumbled about the name; the sauce has also circulated under the alternative label sauce parisienne. "Shirred" is the old American term for eggs baked in a shallow buttered dish, the equivalent of the French oeufs sur le plat, and the word survives now almost nowhere but in cookbooks of this vintage. Filippini's International Cook Book gathers dishes under national labels in exactly this spirit: a French mother sauce, a German name, and an American cooking verb, all in one short paragraph.