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Stuffed Eggs, Russian
Boil twelve fresh eggs for eight minutes, remove, drop in cold water for a minute, shell, then cut them in two crosswise. Scoop out yolks and place in a bowl, mash them with a wooden spoon, then add a teaspoon caviare, half teaspoon anchovy paste, half teaspoon chopped chives, one saltspoon cayenne, half an ounce butter and two tablespoons cream. Sharply stir with a wooden spoon till well amalgamated, then fill up cavities of eggs, join together so they have their former shape, place on a baking dish, pour a Mornay sauce over them, sprinkle a tablespoon bread crumbs on top, set in oven ten minutes, remove and serve.
A straightforward hot canapé of stuffed eggs gratinéed under Mornay, but the original assumes you already know a few things it does not say.
- Cut crosswise, not lengthwiseThe halves are rejoined into whole eggs, so they must be cut across the equator. Shave a thin sliver off each end so the finished eggs sit upright in the dish and do not roll apart under the sauce.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A full quarter teaspoon of cayenne across twelve eggs is assertive but not unreasonable; start with half that if your cayenne is fresh.
- Eight minutes is deliberateEight minutes -- Eight minutes on a rolling boil gives a yolk that is set but still slightly moist at the centre, which mashes into a smoother paste than a chalky twelve-minute yolk. The recipe does not say why eight minutes; the single minute in cold water is only long enough to make them shellable, not to chill them through.
- The filling is short on binderTwelve yolks against half an ounce of butter and two tablespoons of cream will be stiff. Work the butter in while the yolks are still warm and add cream by the spoonful until it pipes; a little more cream is no betrayal of the recipe.
- CaviareA teaspoon of caviar for twelve eggs is a flavour accent, not a garnish, and it is meant to be mashed in. Any firm-grained roe works; substitutes such as salmon or lumpfish roe will tint the filling and may add more salt, so taste before seasoning further.
- Anchovy paste and saltBetween the anchovy paste, the roe and the cheese in the Mornay there is a great deal of salt already. No salt is called for in the filling and none should be added blind.
- Mornay sauceNot given here: it is a bechamel finished off the heat with grated Gruyere or Parmesan, and period versions often enrich it with an egg yolk. Make it slack enough to coat rather than sit in a lump, since ten minutes in the oven will thicken it further.
- Oven and timeTen minutes only browns the top; everything in the dish is already cooked. The book gives no temperature: a hot oven of about 425F, or two or three minutes under the broiler, will colour the crumbs before the sauce breaks.
- YieldTwelve reassembled eggs, served hot as a first course for six, or split again as a warm hors d'oeuvre for twelve.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), which attached national labels to dishes largely as a way of signalling one distinguishing ingredient. What makes these eggs "Russian" is the caviar, much as a "Russian salad" of the same era meant one bound with mayonnaise, and a garnish à la russe was often said to imply something with roe or sour cream in it, though the usage was loose and variable. Everything else on the plate is French restaurant cooking: Mornay sauce, bread crumbs, ten minutes in the oven to glaze. Filippini had spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe reads like the work of a professional kitchen adapting a fashionable luxury import to a form that could be assembled in advance and finished to order. Hard-boiled eggs stuffed with their own seasoned yolks are far older than either tradition and turn up across Europe from the medieval period onward; the caviar and the cheese sauce are the nineteenth-century additions.