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Eggs with Onion Sauce
(Uova trippate) Prepare some hard boiled eggs, shell and cut into disks one third of an inch thick.
Melt in a saucepan a piece of butter in which brown half an onion cut into thin slices, to be removed from the butter when browned.
Then add to the butter two teaspoonfuls of flour, mix but don't allow to brown, thin with a cup of hot broth, add salt and pepper and let simmer for ten minutes. Put the sliced eggs in the sauce to warm them, stir a little, but carefully to avoid breaking them, and do not boil again. Just before serving add to the sauce a teaspoonful of cream and stir carefully. 179
A small, forgiving dish that lives or dies on one point: the sauce must never boil once the eggs go in. Everything else is a plain velouté.
- The hinge: no second boilThe eggs are already cooked; the sauce is only warming them. Bringing it back to a boil toughens the whites and breaks the yolks apart into the sauce. Keep it below a simmer and move the pan off the heat before adding the cream.
- Slicing at a third of an inchAbout 8 mm — thick enough to hold together in the sauce. An egg slicer gives even disks; a wet knife blade keeps the yolks from crumbling. The recipe does not say how many eggs to use.
- Hard boiled, not overcookedTen minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives a set yolk without the grey-green ring. Older eggs peel more cleanly than very fresh ones.
- The onion is a flavouring onlyIt is browned in the butter and then lifted out, so the sauce carries the sweetness without any pieces. Slice it thin so it colours evenly, and take it out before it goes past golden — scorched onion will make the whole sauce bitter.
- Butter and flour quantities"A piece of butter" is not quantified; with two teaspoons of flour, a tablespoon or so keeps the roux loose. It should stay pale — the recipe says not to let the flour brown.
- A cup of hot brothAbout 240 ml, added hot so the roux does not seize into lumps. Homemade or low-sodium stock is better here, since the sauce simmers for ten minutes and canned broth will turn salty — the recipe seasons before that simmer, so go lightly.
- The teaspoonful of creamLiteral, and deliberate: it is a finishing gloss, not an enrichment. Stir it in off the heat. If the sauce has tightened during the ten minutes, loosen it with a spoonful of broth first.
- ServingA light second course. Good on toast or alongside plain rice or boiled potatoes, and it does not hold — assemble it just before it goes to the table.
The Italian name, uova trippate, is generally explained as "eggs done tripe-style": not a dish containing tripe, but eggs cut and sauced the way tripe traditionally is, the disks or strips standing in for the ribbons of offal. Cooks' names of this kind are common in Italian domestic cookery — trippate, in umido, alla diavola describe a treatment rather than an ingredient, and the same title turns up elsewhere in a tomato-and-mint version associated with Roman kitchens. The technique here — butter and flour cooked without colour, thinned with hot stock and finished with a little cream — is the plain flour-thickened broth sauce common to domestic cooking on both sides of the Alps.