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Fried Eggs (Alsace-Lorraine Wash and slice)
(Alsace-Lorraine.) Wash and slice neatly 1 large cooked carrot; add 1 gill of white stock, a spoonful of butter, 12 roasted and shelled chestnuts, and 2 sausages, sliced. Stir and cook 20 minutes, add salt, pepper, and a spoonful of sherry. Pour over the 10 fried eggs, with the vegetables around.
A garnish of carrot, chestnut and sausage spooned over fried eggs — the kind of Alsatian supper dish built around whatever the larder held. The original assumes you already know how to fry an egg, and gives its attention to the ragout.
- Order of workMake the ragout first and hold it warm; fry the eggs at the last minute. Ten fried eggs will not wait, and the sauce is meant to be poured over them the moment they leave the pan.
- A gillAbout half a cup; 4 fl oz by American reckoning, 5 fl oz if the book is using the imperial gill. White stock is an unsmoked, uncoloured stock — veal or chicken made from raw bones without browning. Ordinary chicken stock is the closest supermarket equivalent.
- A spoonfulRead it as a tablespoon in both places. The half-cup of stock will reduce substantially over 20 minutes, which is the point: you want a glossy coating, not a broth.
- ChestnutsTwelve roasted and shelled chestnuts is roughly 4 oz of peeled nuts, i.e. part of a standard vacuum pack or jar of cooked chestnuts. Cooked chestnuts are already tender, so they need only the simmer to take up the sauce.
- SausagesIn Alsace this would mean either a smoked link of the saucisse de Strasbourg/frankfurter type, which is finely ground, or a fresh coarse pork sausage. If using fresh sausage, brown the slices in the butter before the stock goes in so they are cooked through and give up some fat; a smoked or pre-cooked sausage only needs the 20 minutes' simmer.
- The carrotAlready cooked, then sliced and simmered again; a cooked carrot to hand, whether left over or boiled for the purpose. Slice it thick enough (1/4 inch) that it does not collapse into the sauce.
- SherryThe recipe adds it at the end, with the seasoning, so it stays aromatic. A dry sherry suits the sausage better than a sweet one.
- Yield and platingTen eggs serves five as a light main course, two apiece. 'With the vegetables around' suggests the garnish was ranged round the eggs rather than heaped over them, though the recipe says no more than that.
Alsace-Lorraine appears in turn-of-the-century English and American cookbooks as a region worth naming, partly for culinary reasons and partly political: annexed by Germany in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, the provinces remained a preoccupation for travellers and readers until 1918, and cookbooks of the period collected regional dishes as souvenirs of a tour. The combination here reads as a plausibly regional one — chestnuts from the Vosges foothills, smoked pork sausage of the Strasbourg kind, and eggs as the cheap protein that carries the rest. Dishes of fried or poached eggs under a small ragout are often said to have been a way for a French household kitchen to turn a cupful of leftovers into a course, and this one belongs to that family rather than to any single documented regional recipe.