Les oeufs en cocotte aux tomates
I’ve long been a fan of eggs with red sauce. When I was a child, I would toast an Italian roll with provolone cheese on it, fry up an egg, and make an egg-cheese-and-sauce sandwich for breakfast or weekend lunch. My sauce of choice in those days was the Newman’s Own “Sockarooni” that my mother stocked, and which I will also admit to eating straight with a spoon.
As an adult, I make my own red sauce, in the old-school simmering-for-hours way, and I’ll often fry eggs and dress them with some sauce for breakfast or brunch. Last week, I made a large batch of sauce with sausage in, and up until today I had two quart containers full in my refrigerator.
This morning, I was cranky and in no mood for any of my normal breakfast options. It was closing in on 11:30am, and nothing I thought of made me happy. I yanked two cookbooks from the shelf and flipped through them, and in Craig Claiborne’s The New New York Time Cookbook I found a recipe entitled “Les Oeufs en Cocotte aux Tomates (Eggs in ramekins with tomato sauce)”.
The tomato sauce in the recipe is not an Italian-style red sauce, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to use it in any case: I was going to steal the idea and the cooking method and use the sauce in my fridge.
- about 8-10 tbsp red sauce with sausage chunks (or your favorite red sauce)
- 4 eggs
- salt & pepper
- 4 slices toast
I placed 4 ramekins into a large Pyrex baking dish. Into the bottoms of the ramekins, I put a heaping spoonful of sauce, making sure there was a chunk of sausage in each, and reserving some sauce for topping later. Over each pile of sauce, I cracked an egg, and sprinkled with salt and pepper. I poured boiling water into the Pyrex dish until it came halfway up the side of the ramekins, and then popped the whole thing into a 400 degree oven until the eggs were just set. The original recipe said 10-12 minutes, but that was using hot tomato sauce; my sauce was just out of the fridge and slowed things down considerably — it took about 20 minutes.
I pulled it out of the oven, top-dressed the eggs with a little more sauce (reheated, of course) and served with toast fingers and cafe con leche.
Bliss!