France and the Alps · Volume 13, Wine, Mustard and the Fifth Quarter
Oeufs en meurette
Burgundy
Illustration
Emerged in nineteenth-century Burgundian farmhouses; the sauce essentially borrows boeuf bourguignon's braising liquid, applied instead to poached eggs. "Meurette" is attested from the fourteenth century, from Latin muria, brine or pickling liquid, and the framing of the dish as a way of using up leftover braising wine with plentiful farm eggs, while widely repeated, rests on tourism retelling rather than a primary source and should be read as plausible rather than documented.
As tradition built it
Reduce the sauce by half; poach the eggs 3 minutes.
Ingredients
- 150g lardons
- 1 onion, finely diced
- 1 shallot, finely diced
- 40g butter
- 200g a handful of button mushrooms, quartered
- 100g pearl onions
- 375ml, or to taste red Burgundy
- 25g butter, 1 tbsp flour a beurre manié (butter and flour), to thicken
- to taste a final knob of cold butter, to mount
- 4 fresh eggs
- as available vinegar, for the poaching water
- 4 slices country bread, sliced and grilled
- 1 clove a cut clove of garlic, to rub the hot toast
Method
- Sweat the lardons, onion and shallot in butter until the fat renders and the onion softens.
- Add the quartered mushrooms and pearl onions.
- Deglaze with the red Burgundy and reduce by half.
- Thicken lightly with the beurre manié worked in off the heat, then mount with a final knob of cold butter for gloss.
- Poach the eggs separately in barely simmering, lightly vinegared water, three minutes for a properly soft yolk, and drain well before setting into the sauce.
- Serve over grilled slices of country bread, rubbed with a cut clove of garlic while still hot, with the sauce spooned generously over the top so the yolk breaks into it at the table.
What a modern chef changes
Sous vide-poached eggs, a chinois-strained sauce and a bacon-powder dust
Method
- Poach the eggs sous vide at 63°C for forty five minutes, holding a perfectly set white and a fully liquid yolk with none of the ragged white trails a hob-poached egg risks, then finish each egg with a brief dip in hot water just before plating to warm the shell surface.
- Strain the finished sauce through a chinois before mounting with butter, for a properly silky, grit-free finish rather than one carrying visible lardon and onion fragments.
- Dry-toast the bread over the Big Green Egg's direct heat rather than under a grill, for genuine char and smoke rather than an even, flat toast.
- Dust a little dehydrated bacon powder, made from crisped, blitzed lardon trim, over the top at the table, a concentrated savoury note that plays on the same lardon flavour already in the sauce rather than introducing a foreign one.