EGGS IN HELL & OTHER DEVILS

Anthony Bourdain, Escoffier, Martha Stewart, Richard Olney, and Julia Child on eggs. The images and recipes. With or without Truffles. Eggs in Hell Texas Style. Deviled Eggs. SF White Truffle storm.

At my post Chez Panisse Berkeley restaurant, the Santa Fe Bar & Grill.

I combined deviled with Texas and Hell.

The French Regional Dinners at Chez Panisse for which I wrote the menus been a huge success and got us into the black for the first time. Now again, but at the SFBG, we needed cash flow. This time American regions, and I picked Texas because we had BBQ Sauce down to an art.

Eggs in the colors of hell, with some of its heated flavors.

Their recipe from my first cookbook, the 1985 Jeremiah Tower’s New American Classics.

Use your favorite chile hot BBQ sauce and here is the recipe for the puree.

Red Bell Pepper Puree

This puree is not always sauce by itself. Added to mayonnaise, sour cream, whipped cream, sabayon, olive oil, or butter, or mounted with stock and butter, it becomes a sauce for salads, soups, and grilled fish and meats prepared in countless ways.

Makes 1 ½ cups

6 large red bell peppers

3 tablespoons olive oil

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Rub the peppers with the oil and put them in a baking pan. Cover with aluminum foil and cook until soft, about 35 minutes. Remove from the oven and let stand, still covered, until cool.

Remove the skin from the peppers and discard the stems and seeds. Puree the peppers in a food processor and pass through a fine sieve or food mill.

Whisk in the olive oil and season.

Stuffed Eggs

Image: Lana’s Cooking

If you devil these hell eggs, they are even more delicious.

“Deviled eggs in American English or devilled eggs in Commonwealth English, are in the family of stuffed eggs, curried eggs, dressed eggs or angel eggs, and are hard-boiled eggs that have been peeled, cut in half, and stuffed.”

One of my favorite things to eat.

And every time I write deviled, I have to look up if it is one or two ‘l’s. Having learned to spell first in Australia (Commonwealth) and then in England. With their two.

Deviled Eggs with Pickapeppa

Deviled or use Indian lime pickle, or mango chutney, hot sauce for a bit of heat, or beet horseradish.

For a more surprising visual effect and a more complex dish, instead of halving the eggs around the middle, cut off the tops and bottoms, scoop out the yolks without damaging the whites, make the deviled yolk mix, then put it in a pastry bag and fill the eggs by piping the egg mixture back into the hollowed-out whites. Serve them standing up. With any sauce spooned over.

4 large eggs

¼cup sour cream

½ teaspoon English powdered mustard

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

4 drops Tabasco sauce

Salt

½ cup mayonnaise

4 tablespoons Pickapeppa sauce

2 tablespoons shredded nasturtium flowers

Put the eggs in a heavy saucepan that will just hold them in one layer, cover them with cold water by 1 inch, and bring to a boil over high heat. The moment the water boils, remove the pan from the heat, cover it, and let stand 10 minutes. Then immediately cool the eggs under cold running water. If the water is not cold, add some ice.

Peel the eggs, slice them lengthwise, and scoop out the yolk. Put the yolks in a bowl and mix with the sour cream, powdered mustard, Dijon mustard, and hot Tabasco until smooth. Taste for salt.

Put the mixture back in the egg whites and put the egg halves on plates with the flat side down.

Mix the mayonnaise and the Pickapeppa sauce together, and spoon over the eggs to “nap” them. Garnish the eggs and plates with the flowers.

If that is to much just scramble a few eggs and spoon over heavily buttered white toast.

Devilishly Simple Scrambled Eggs

Escoffier

This great modern chef (and founder of much of what we know as Western cooking) said of eggs: “Of all the products put into requisition by the art of cookery, not one is so fruitful of variety, so universally liked, and so complete in itself as the egg.

Of scrambling he believed “When, the eggs are still smooth and creamy, take the pan off the fire, and finish the preparation by means of one and one-half oz. of butter (divided into small quantities) and three tablespoonfuls of [cold] cream.”

His “Grand Mere” scrambled had “little crusts, cut into dice, fried in clarified butter, and prepared in time to be inserted into the eggs very hot.”

Sounds heavenly to me, and his Devilled Eggs were deviled by brown butter and a few drops of vinegar.

Richard Olney

Was all for the French method of scrambling eggs called oeufs brouillés or a brouillade. No other way of scrambling eggs achieves as superb a texture and flavor. The eggs are cooked slowly over hot water and incorporated with a good deal of butter, giving them an ethereal texture and flavor quite unlike the rubber-mat, dry “egginess” of short-order scrambled eggs.

Olney was an avid fan of Escoffier and his Le Guide Culinaire, so he told me to finish the eggs with a dash of cold heavy cream, not so much to add flavor and texture, though they did that, as to arrest the cooking.

Julia Child

For her eggs she just repeated what Olney had taught her, with a little borrowing from Escoffier. The raw egg at the end is strictly Julia. One does, after all, have to make it one’s own.

“Julia Child’s method for perfect, custard-like scrambled eggs involves cooking them low and slow in a buttered, non-stick pan, stirring constantly with a spatula to create small, soft curds. Key techniques include seasoning with salt/pepper before cooking, omitting dairy for richer flavor, and stirring in a tablespoon of raw egg or cold butter at the end to stop the cooking process.

Anthony Bourdain

Had a lot to say about eggs, especially scrambled as long as they were not for brunch which he hated.

‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌His top tip? To use fresh eggs and skip the add-ins.

“I am old school.” he said. saying it’s all about the quality of the eggs. Seems obvious? But it is alo about simplicity and keeping it simple. And like “really simple things, more often than not people find a way to overcomplicate and screw up.”

And no milk as in so many recipes. “You aren’t making a quiche here, “ he said.

Martha Stewart

Image: Facebook

Scrambled eggs are often made with butter plus cream, milk, or water. For Martha there’s no milk, cream, or water. Her secret is clarified butter.

“Crack the eggs into a bowl and whisk well with a fork to combine. Season with salt and pepper.

Add clarified butter to a skillet—a good rule of thumb is 1 tablespoon per egg.

Heat the butter over medium-high heat, and add the eggs, stirring them immediately and often with a rubber spatula while they cook to your desired doneness. Ideally, they should be cooked just until set but not browned, about two minutes.

Serve the scrambled eggs on warmed plates and drizzle with even more clarified butter for additional richness and flavor.”

Black-Truffled Scrambled Eggs

Image: JT

Black-truffled scrambled eggs were first served to me by Richard Olney in his house perched in an old, terraced olive grove above the village of Solliès-Toucas, near Toulon. Ever since they are my all-time favorite version of this dish. With those eggs, we drank a tired old Bordeaux, making a memorable marriage of the wine, the eggs, and the earthy, fallen-leaves perfume of the truffles.

If the truffle is frozen, cut it into thin matchsticks while still unthawed, and put them in a bowl. Add the eggs and leave unbeaten, covered, at room temperature for two hours before proceeding, to absorb the flavor of the truffles. You will need to use a hot water bath.

1½ ounces black truffles

8 large eggs

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature

2 tablespoons cold heavy cream

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, chilled, cut in 4 pieces

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Coat the bottom and sides of a 2-quart saucepan with 2 tablespoons of the room-temperature butter.

Beat the eggs until just well mixed, add the seasonings and the remaining soft butter, and put into the saucepan. Put the saucepan in the hot-water bath and stir the eggs with a wooden spoon for about 8 minutes, making sure to scrape all the surfaces of the pan, especially the corners. Never stop stirring or let the eggs stick to the pan. If the eggs get too hot and start to thicken too quickly, remove the pan from the water for a minute or so.

When the eggs are nearly done, stir in the cream and cook 30 seconds more. Turn off the heat and stir in the chilled butter; this will stop the cooking and enrich the texture and taste of the eggs.

Spoon the eggs onto four hot plates and serve immediately with country bread or grilled brioche.

Devils in San Francisco

One day in San Francisco I learned that one does not always need eggs to appreciate truffles. I had been promised them but didn’t know how they would be served.

When I arrived at the restaurant, on the table as I arrived was a pound of white truffles sitting on a napkin with their slicer.

Here the truffles are black, but the slicer is the same for both.

Then a huge platter of ice on its stand arrived, the ice covered in 36 oysters. I tried shavings on an oyster since it appeared there might be too many of these lovely aromatic creamy white mushrooms to eat, and looked up at Mark.

“Patience, my dear, patience,” he said.

It is rare that one gets to slice away on white truffle with no one (or one’s financial conscience) to say ‘stop.’ I sliced away until I was nearly embarrassed.

Save some for the next dish I was told. In minutes I had in front of me a plate of tissue thin cured Wagyu beef. It melted across my tongue in a way that nothing had ever before. I wanted a shirt made of it. I wanted more. I wanted it not to stop.

A discrete cough from the waiter made me look up. A bowl was on its way across the dining room. A big white one filled with perfect French fries. No truffle oil on these boys, no, just a full minute of slicing and lashings of the real thing over the potatoes.

The perfume of the truffles coming off the bed of those other tubers, as their heat penetrated the slices, suffused the air around our table. Even the waiter looked a bit faint as I asked him to use my i-Pad to photograph the truffles falling onto the most glorious fried potatoes I had ever seen, smelled, and finally tasted.

When I got to my next stop at Foreign Cinema restaurant to test cocktails for our Stars event the next day, everyone could smell me.

“Oh my god, Jeremiah, you have been at it again.”

Thank you for reading JEREMIAH TOWER’S OUT OF THE OVEN! Free subscribers will receive an occasional publication. Paid subscribers will receive a weekly publication, as well as menus, recipes and full access to archives. Now including over 150 articles, and growing. I hope you like it!