French Provincial Cooking (41 page)

There are still plenty of lovely egg dishes of a much simpler kind to be made at home; with constant practice and given the time, it is perfectly possible to poach a few eggs successfully; an omelette is very easily made, in spite of all the talk about light hands and heavy frying pans; and once you know the trick, the shelling of
œufs mollets
is quite easy, provided you have a steady hand.

I shall try to explain these things, and others connected with the successful manipulation of eggs, for they are well worth the practice needed and the time and money you must spend. From unsuccessful attempts there is much to be learnt, so one must count an occasional wasted egg or failed soufflé as profit rather than loss. Egg dishes have a kind of elegance, a freshness, an allure, which sets them quite apart from any other kind of food, so that it becomes a great pleasure to be able to cook them properly and to serve them in just the right condition.

Eggs in their own right, as well as all those allied dishes such as the onion tarts of Alsace, the cream and bacon
quiches
of Lorraine and all the various cheese and egg, potato and cream, and hot pastry confections of the different provinces of France which come under the heading of hot hors-d’œuvre make the best possible dishes to serve as a first course at luncheon on the occasions when something hot is required. But it cannot be claimed that these are particularly
light
dishes. Eggs, and especially eggs with cheese or cream, are very filling. So if you are starting with a soufflé, or an onion tart, or a
pipérade,
it is best to make the second course something not too rich, and certainly not one requiring an egg or cream sauce.

Although eggs are cooked in such a variety of exquisite ways by French cooks, the ordinary boiled egg is not their strong point. One would be lucky, I think, to get boiled eggs as good as those described by Henry James after a luncheon at Bourg-en-Bresse, which was composed entirely of boiled eggs and bread and butter. ‘They were so good that I am ashamed to say how many of them I consumed.’ An
œuf à /a coque
in fact usually means, in France, an egg plunged in boiling water, taken out again, and there you are. But Madame St. Ange, thorough in this matter as in all others, gives no less than five different methods of boiling an egg in her incomparable
Livre de Cuisine,
starting off her chapter on eggs with the remark that a ‘true boiled egg must have been laid the day it is to be eaten.’ Not an easy rule to observe, but certainly few people will quarrel with the rule that an egg more than three days old had better be cooked some other way.

Here are the Saint-Ange methods, summarised:

(1) Allowing
pint of water for 2 eggs, bring it to the boil in a fairly deep saucepan. Off the fire, lower the eggs into the water in a tablespoon. Cover the pan and cook 4 minutes without further boiling.

(2) Put the eggs into a saucepan; cover them plentifully with cold water. When the water reaches a full boil, the eggs are cooked. Remove them at once.

(3) Bring a saucepan of water to the boil; remove from the fire to put in the eggs. Cover the pan. Put back on the fire. From the moment the water comes to the boil again allow 3 minutes. If the eggs are very large leave them a further minute off the fire.

(4) Plunge the eggs into the pan of boiling water. Taking it immediately from the fire, keep it closely covered for 10 minutes.

(5) Plunge the eggs into boiling water. Cover; leave
one
minute over the fire. Remove from the fire and leave 5 minutes.

 

From all these alternatives everyone should surely be able to choose that which suits them best. Personally, I prefer systems No. 4 or 5, which produce boiled eggs with nice creamy whites. With the first method they are insufficiently cooked for my taste, and methods No. 2 and 3 are useful if you are in a hurry but do not produce such lovely whites.

There seems to be no really adequate translation of the word
mollet
in this context. Soft eggs mean to us soft-boiled breakfast eggs; ‘tender eggs,’ as I have seen them translated, is explanatory enough but somehow sounds odd. Perhaps it is best just to leave them in the French. They are cooked in boiling water until they are of a consistency midway between a soft-boiled and a hard-boiled egg; that is to say that the whites are quite set, the yolks still just runny. For the average egg 5 minutes is the exact time to allow from the moment the eggs are plunged into boiling water; as soon as they are taken out cool them under the running cold tap to prevent further cooking. For very small or very large eggs the timing must obviously be slightly adjusted. Owing to the time lag between the lowering of the first egg and, say, the fifth or sixth into the water, it is perhaps easier to pour the boiling water over the eggs in the saucepan, allowing for a few extra seconds’ cooking while the water comes back to the boil. Alternatively, there exists a useful utensil, usually obtainable at Woolworths as well as at good kitchen stores, in which 4 to 6 eggs are placed, the whole gadget being lowered into a deep pan of boiling water, so that the risk of the eggs cracking is minimised, and the timing greatly facilitated.

Once shelled as described below, the eggs can be kept ready, if they are to be served with a hot sauce, in a bowl of warm water.
Œufs mollets
are suitable, in fact preferable in many ways, for most dishes in which poached eggs are generally used, especially for eggs in aspic jelly.

To shell hard-boiled or
mollet
eggs, they should be plunged immediately they are cooked into cold water, to arrest the cooking, and to make them cool enough to handle. If it is not convenient to shell them at once they can be left until they are quite cold, but on the whole it is easier to shell them while they are still warm. Many people find this quite a difficult operation, particularly with
mollet
eggs.

The best way to set about it is to tap the egg gently all over, as soon as it can be handled, with the back of a knife, until the whole egg is mapped over with fine cracks. Hold the egg in the palm of one hand, and with the other start peeling, and both inner skin and shell should come off quite easily as you turn the egg carefully over. Of course, in the case of
mollet
eggs caution must be exercised or they may break, so do not try to do this operation in a hurry. Take your time over it, doing it with care and deliberation.

If there are little particles of shell adhering to the egg, it is easier to remove them by dipping the egg in cold water rather than picking them off by hand.

Scrape and shred 3 large carrots, melt a good lump of butter in a heavy pan and in this stew the carrots, covered, until they are quite soft. The flame must be kept very low or the carrots will burn. In the meantime prepare
pint of thick béchamel sauce and cook 4
mollet
eggs—that is, eggs boiled exactly 5 minutes, cooled, and shelled. Or, if you prefer, poach the eggs.

Season the carrots, place a spoonful in the bottom of each individual small egg dish, put the egg on the top and cover with the béchamel. Sprinkle very lightly with breadcrumbs and a little melted butter. Put the egg dishes on a baking sheet at the top of a very hot oven for 4 to 5 minutes.

On the whole, the most satisfactory and the simplest way to hard-boil eggs is to put them in a saucepan in which they just about fit (you don’t want two eggs rattling about in a huge saucepan), cover them completely with cold water, bring them gently to the boil and then cook them 7 to 10 minutes. Drain off the hot water and run plenty of cold water over them so that they stop cooking at once. By this method the yolks should emerge yellow and not too crumbly and without that sinister ring of grey round the edge.

Stuffed hard-boiled eggs, however carefully and subtly made the stuffing, nearly always finish up by being dull. I have tried many sound French and other recipes for such dishes, and invariably found them lacking in charm; with a sauce they become stodgy; without one, dry. If it is a question of improvising in an emergency, I think it is preferable to serve hard-boiled eggs quite plain as a salad, with a vinaigrette dressing, with mayonnaise, or perhaps heated up in a tomato sauce, thereby dispensing with the fiddling jobs of mashing up sardines or anchovies, taking the yolks out of the eggs, putting them back again, decorating the dish and all the rest of it.

Recipes for
œufs mayonnaise
and other cold egg dishes will be found in the hors-d’œuvre chapter.

(
Also called Œufs à la Lyonnaise
)

In a thick frying pan, stew
lb. very finely sliced mild onions in 1
oz. butter until they turn pale yellow; season them with salt, pepper and nutmeg, stir in a dessertspoon of flour and, when it has amalgamated, pour in
pint of milk. Cook gently for 15 to 20 minutes. If the sauce becomes too thick, add a little more milk or cream. Carefully incorporate 4 thickly sliced hard-boiled eggs and shake the pan without stirring until the eggs are hot. At the last minute add a good lump of butter cut into little pieces and, when it has melted, transfer to a hot serving dish. A silver entrée dish, it used to be, until such things were replaced with fireproof glass, for this dish was at one time immensely popular in England as a first course at luncheon. It was also known under the name of Convent Eggs, the other alternative name of
œufs à /a lyonnaise
being due to the presence of the onions in the sauce, since onions are associated by popular tradition with the cookery of Lyon.