In La cuisine, c’est beaucoup plus que des recettes (Cooking is much more than recipes), Alain Chapel introduces a simple egg recipe which he says was a favourite of his mentor — Jean Vignard, of the legendary Lyon restaurant Chez Juliette — particularly after an evening service. He describes it as:
“a cooks dish…simplicity and accuracy”
I have never seen this recipe printed in English, however I have seen a version from Michel Troisgros who includes beetroots, and says it is the only way his father Pierre ever cooked his eggs. Nicolas Fontaine, chef at Gaya in Paris, published a recipe on Le Fooding, which also uses beets. If anyone knows more about the history of the dish, I’d love to know more.
The version as written by Chapel is delicious, and will leave you with 30g of spare butter which he never tells you what to do with (put it on some toast, perhaps); I have added some raw Cervennes onion, because they’re delicious and feel suitable for an assassin. I also like to have mine with some warm flour tortillas, but you can have them however you like. Alain also flips his eggs, whereas I love seeing the bright yolks just warmed through from below in a pool of foaming butter.
Ingredients, for one:
3 large, fresh farm eggs
6 teaspoons of good red wine vinegar, I used some I made last winter from pinot noir, any shop bought stuff will be fine
30g of butter
About a third of a small sweet onion, such as Cévennes, sliced very finely (slicing lengthways with the direction of growth, as opposed to radial cuts)
salt and pepper
Optional: bread…I like these with warm tortillas
Method:
Melt the butter over a medium heat until it is foaming, then lower the heat right down and crack in your eggs
Warm your plate up whilst the eggs cook, either in a low oven or with water.
When the eggs are just cooked, set them on the warm plate, and pour off the excess butter. You can keep this to split the vinegar dressing at the end if you like butter as much as I do.
Pour the vinegar into your egg pan, raise the heat, and reduce by half. In the photo you can see where I just barely over-reduced my vinegar.
Drizzle the ‘blood drops’ of vinegar over your eggs, cover with your finely sliced onion, and season with salt and pepper.