Eggs au Gratin

Œufs au gratin (eggs baked beneath a cheese crust) teach the timing of a rapid gratin. The Mornay must go into the dishes very hot, because the fierce bake is meant to colour the surface at the same instant the eggs set, not spend its first minutes warming cold sauce. That is the one true thing to know before touching a pan.

The source assumed a saucier keeping Mornay ready, stockpots that never cooled, small service dishes, and a fierce oven with a salamander close at hand. Your kitchen needs none of that brigade scaffolding: begin with the finished Mornay the entry calls for, arrange four shallow dishes on one tray, and let a fully heated oven with a brief broiler finish provide the fierce top heat. The hot sauce below and above, the cheese-and-raspings finish governed by Gratins (No. 268), and that hard heat are the dish, so they stay. Only the equipment and portion have changed, scaled to two eggs per person. One cook, one stove, one evening.

Done properly, the Mornay remains ivory and supple beneath a mottled bronze crust, the whites set tenderly and the yolks stay soft under their thin coat of sauce. Bring the Mornay nearly to a simmer, assemble without delay, and move the dishes straight into the oven. That hot beginning decides everything.