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Shirred Eggs, Robert
Heat in a frying pan one tablespoon butter, adding one medium, finely chopped white onion; cook for five minutes, then add half teaspoon ground English mustard and stir while heating for half minute; pour in one tablespoon vinegar with a gill demi-glace. Finely chop three medium-sized vinegar pickles and add to the same; boil for five minutes, then keep warm.
Lightly butter six individual shirred-egg dishes and carefully break two fresh eggs into each. Mix half teaspoon salt with two saltspoons white pepper and equally season the eggs with it. Evenly divide the sauce over the eggs and set in the oven to bake for five minutes. Remove and immediately send to the table.
A classic sauce Robert spooned over baked eggs. The sauce does all the work and can be made ahead; the only real difficulty is that the original timing will leave you with raw whites.
- A gill4 fl oz, half a cup, in American usage; an imperial gill is 5 fl oz, so the sauce could be a little looser. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "two saltspoons white pepper" is a half teaspoon, seasoning twelve eggs.
- Demi-glaceClassically espagnole and brown stock reduced together by half. A good jarred or frozen demi-glace concentrate works; failing that, reduce a cup of strong brown stock to a scant half cup. Bouillon cubes will make the sauce salty and thin.
- Ground English mustardDry mustard powder, not the prepared paste in a jar. Add it off the direct heat and give it only the half minute specified — held longer over the flame it turns bitter.
- Vinegar picklesCornichons or small sour gherkins, not sweet pickles. Onion, mustard, vinegar and demi-glace is sauce Robert; the chopped pickles are what turn it into the charcutière variation.
- Shirred-egg dishesShallow individual gratin dishes, ramekins or small cocottes, about 4 inches across. Set them on a baking sheet so they are easy to pull out together.
- Oven and timeThe original names no temperature and five minutes is not enough. Bake at 375F for 10 to 14 minutes, until the whites are set and the yolks still soft; the layer of sauce insulates the tops and slows the setting considerably. Warm the dishes and the sauce before they go in and the eggs cook more evenly.
- Sauce placementSpooning sauce over the yolks makes doneness impossible to judge. Ringing the sauce around the whites and leaving the yolks bare gives the same dish with something to look at.
- YieldSix servings of two eggs each — a substantial luncheon or supper dish rather than a first course. Serve with toast; the sauce is sharp enough to want bread.
Sauce Robert is one of the oldest named sauces in the French repertoire, appearing in cookery manuscripts by the late medieval period and famously invoked by Rabelais, who jokes that it was invented by a man named Robert; the attribution is traditional rather than documented. By the nineteenth century the sauce had settled into a form close to the one given here — onion sweated in butter, mustard, vinegar and a brown reduction — and Escoffier gives a version along these lines, though his also takes white wine; he notes that when chopped gherkins are added it becomes sauce charcutière, the standard accompaniment to grilled pork. Its appearance over baked eggs is characteristic of the international cookbooks of the early 1900s.