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Stuffed Eggs with Sardines
Boil twelve fresh eggs for eight minutes, take up, plunge in cold water for a minute, remove, shell, and cut in halves lengthwise. Scoop out yolks and place in a mortar with three sardines, three saltspoons salt, a saltspoon cayenne, half saltspoon grated nutmeg, half ounce butter, two tablespoons cream, and briskly pound to a paste, then press through sieve into a bowl and fill up cavities of whites with mixture. Arrange on a baking dish, pour a Mornay sauce and sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese over, set in oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
A Delmonico's-style savoury that comes together quickly once the Mornay is made. The whole dish depends on the yolk paste being smooth and the finish being brief and hot.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So three saltspoons salt is 3/4 teaspoon, the cayenne is 1/4 teaspoon, and the nutmeg 1/8 teaspoon. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- Eight minutes is deliberateThat gives a yolk just set through, which purees far more smoothly than a chalky twelve-minute yolk. The cold-water plunge is not optional; leave the eggs in it until they are cool enough to handle rather than the stated minute, or the whites tear when you halve them.
- Skip the truly fresh eggsThe original specifies fresh because that was a mark of quality, but very fresh eggs are notoriously difficult to shell. Eggs a week or two old peel cleanly and taste no different here.
- SardinesOil-packed canned sardines, drained and with any large backbone removed. Three fish is roughly 40-50 g, enough to season twelve yolks without turning the filling into fish paste.
- Mortar or food processorA small processor does the pounding in seconds, and the sieve step is still worth doing: pressing the paste through a fine sieve is what makes the filling silky rather than grainy. Then pipe or spoon it into the whites.
- The MornayA bechamel with Gruyere and/or Parmesan stirred in off the heat, loose enough to pour but thick enough to cling. Make it before you fill the eggs so it is still warm when it goes over them; a cold sauce will not glaze in five minutes.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature, only five minutes in the oven; since everything is already cooked, the heat is doing nothing but browning. A hot oven, around 450F, or a broiler for two to three minutes, will do it: pull the dish as soon as the top is spotted brown, or the sauce will break and the whites toughen.
- YieldTwenty-four halves, which serves six to eight as a first course or a light lunch with bread and a salad.
Stuffed eggs are one of the oldest continuously made dishes in European cooking; seasoned yolks pounded and returned to the white appear in Roman and medieval sources long before anyone called them deviled. What marks this version as turn-of-the-century restaurant food is the finish: rather than serving the eggs cold from a platter, they are masked in Mornay, dusted with Parmesan and flashed in the oven, the same gratin treatment applied at the time to sole, endive and poached eggs alike. Mornay sauce -- bechamel enriched with cheese -- is generally traced to nineteenth-century French kitchens and named for a Mornay, though which one is not settled. The mortar, the saltspoon measures and the insistence on pressing the yolk mixture through a sieve all point to a professional hand writing for the domestic reader, which is exactly the register of the international cookbooks of this period: hotel technique, scaled down to twelve eggs.