Poached Eggs in Red Wine Sauce (Oeufs en Meurette)

In my life, lately, a phony has been masquerading as the real deal. I got married to someone who committed to me, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live, and then mysteriously bailed on me after a mere year and a half. And In Lyon, France, once the gastronomic capital of the culinary world, the cooks in those marvelous traditional bouchons are using Maggi bouillon cubes instead of long-cooked homemade stock. The workhorse of French cooking, stock is the basis for everything here, soups, sauces, and without it, you have a house with no foundation, a choreography with no dancers, a marriage without a husband.

Planning some blog entries, and wanting to make something traditional, from the bouchons, I looked at the menu of my favorite one, Café des Fédérations, and saw oeufs en meurette listed. I’ve been curious about these poached eggs in red wine sauce for a while now, and having only Saturday to cook, I thought it would make an excellent, and very French, brunch.

At the market I found shallots, eggs, garlic, poitrine de porc (to make the tasty ham strips called lardons), freshly churned butter, parsley, and hearty whole wheat bread. A tannic red, a Bourgogne, came from the wine shop, and poultry stock or veal stock from? I was stuck. I couldn’t roast bones and make stock in my tiny apartment kitchen, and didn’t want to use chemical-laden bouillon cubes, but this is France, surely there is homemade stock available somewhere.

I asked at the butcher, and they drew me a map to Picard, a strange and antiseptic store full of only freezers and frozen foods, but no frozen stock. I asked at the grocery store. No. I asked at the bouchon called Chez Paul, across the street from Café des Fédérations, and they directed me to a gourmet shop around the corner. Yes, they will have it, I was assured. It comes in a small container, just what we use, she said. Yet, once at the shop, they presented me with Maggi bouillon cubes. No, not that, “Je cherche le vrai fond de veau ou volaille,” So, as a last resort I hesitantly entered my favorite bouchon.

This bouchon is where my future husband and I celebrated our engagement with our invited families. Mine came from the US, his from Switzerland and France, and there we ate our way through the various specialties of Lyon: lentil and poached egg salads, quenelles with crayfish and lobster sauces, roasted leg of lamb, tripe sausages in mustard sauce, and Saint-Marcellin and cervelle de canut cheeses for dessert. The food at this restaurant was phenomenal, and the convivial atmosphere begged for a repeat visit.

I entered the restaurant and told the manager that I had been looking all over for real veal or poultry stock, and would they please just sell me a small container of it, I would be most appreciative, s’il vous plait.

“On n’a pas le vrai fond de veau,” she said, dropping the news like a week-old baguette. You what? You don’t have real veal stock? What with all the sauces you are making? Oeufs en meurette is on your menu, for crying out loud, and you don’t make your own stock? No, she says, we use bouillon cubes from the store, like everyone else.

So, armed with the truth, I've got a plan. Before my departure to NY, I'd like to eat at a bouchon as a farewell to Lyon, and I have decided that I will first call up a few places to ask which ones use homemade ingredients, including stocks, before choosing my destination. How I wish it were as easy with people. Hello, husband? Are you the real deal? Do you roast your own bones? What time is the last service? Oh, and are you insistent on turning tables, or will you let me stay awhile?

Poached Eggs in Red Wine Sauce (Oeufs en Meurette)
adapted from a recipe at épicurien

Note from Banu: In keeping with the tradition of this post, I will call this kinda sorta phony oeufs en meurette, because I've seen recipes that appear more authentic than this one, and now that I look carefully, the recipe I used as a guide is Belgian! Other recipes use a bouquet garni (an assortment of herbs assembled to add flavor and fragrance to the broth), and ask you to poach the eggs directly in the sauce, before reducing it. As a novice egg poacher, I like this recipe because the eggs are poached in a separate, albeit milder (more boring) broth, but the filaments of egg white that remain after novice egg poaching will float around in a sauce you discard, and not one you eat. This is a fairly simple way to get the main idea of the oeufs en meurette, while still using real stock, which is easily found in liquid containers in most grocery stores in the US. Or, for the realest deal oeufs en meurette, you could make your own.

8 very fresh eggs
3 shallots, chopped
about a cup of bacon or pancetta, chopped (or, if you’re in France, poitrine de porc, demi sel - lard)
one bottle of tannic red wine, such as Bourgogne or Syrah
1 1/2 to 2 cups of veal stock or poultry stock
4 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
8 small slices of crusty wheat bread
2 garlic cloves, halved
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 stalks of fresh parsley, chopped
salt and pepper

Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in a large pan, and add the bacon or pancetta or lardons, and cook over medium high heat. When the pork is browned slightly, remove the meat from the pan, and saute the shallots in the butter, until soft and translucent. Add 3/4 of the bottle of red wine and the stock, and let the mixture reduce over low flame until 2/3 of it remains. Add the pork back to the sauce. Stir in the chopped parsley, and remove from the heat. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Meanwhile, bring a liter of water, the remaining red wine, and the red wine vinegar to a very low simmer (the bubbles should barely break the surface). Very carefully, add an egg to the water, cooking them one at a time, so the whites don’t break up. Poach, gently, in the liquid for 3-4 minutes, or until the yolk is cooked a little, but still soft. Take out the egg, and let it rest on a paper towel, to soak up the extra liquid. Repeat with the other eggs.

Toast the slices of bread, and rub them with the garlic halves.

Just before serving, incorporate the flour into the remaining two tablespoons of butter by cutting them together with a knife, or a fork. Stir this butter and flour mixture into the sauce.

Place a little sauce on a plate, place two slices of toast on each plate, and top with an egg each. Pour a little more sauce over the eggs. Serve immediately.

Similar recipes from A Hungry Bear Won't Dance: Cauliflower, Mint, and Olive Quiche with Spelt and Rye Flour Crust, Raspberry and Blueberry Whole Wheat Muffins,
German Good Friday Pancakes and Homemade Sausage Patties

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Lunch in Lyon

On my way to the market this morning, a crooked gray-haired man with leathery sunned skin and a basketful of summer’s harvest under his arm, leaned in as he passed, and, cigarette dangling from his lips, said to me, “très jolie.” Ah, you made me smile little Frenchman, and I remembered an experiment I’ve wanted to try: instead of giving weight to the things that annoy me in life, I’ve wanted to see what would happen if I commented on all the nice thoughts that pass through my mind.

In France, that translates to forgetting the time in Paris when the server questioned why I needed a paper napkin with my coffee, and when I answered honestly, and in French, that I had a cold, and didn’t have any tissues with me to blow my nose, the server replied, “this is a café , not a pharmacy,” and delivered my coffee straight, no napkin. It also means ignoring the time in Lyon when the shopkeeper pulled the carpet up from under my feet as I was passing by, unconcerned that I might have fallen, and it means forgiving the Tabasco incident a while ago, when the French waiter refused to bring the hot sauce for my brunch potatoes because “it is not done”.

It involves a new way. It involves seeing the lovely things here: the pastries that look like lacquered jewels in shop windows (and taste as rich), the red terracotta tiled rooftops sloping with the slow shift of the earth, their brick chimneys rising haphazardly like an obstacle course at dusk for the flying swifts. It means taking in the fragrance of the market (and the character of the brusque but jovial farmers who sell there), the thyme-infused tapenade, the wine soaked goat cheese studded with cloves, the summery rosé with just a hint of pink. It involves appreciating the beauty of a culture that names a fruit mirabelle, that takes an hour and a half for lunch, and funds the arts because, for the French, art is as essential as food. I am smiling as I wander these twisty intimate streets, the sun shining on and shadowing different bits of facades with each turn. The rivers. The churches. The fountains. The old town. The market. The cobblestones. The golden tiptops of buildings. Très jolie...
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Pasta with Ground Beef, Parsley, Garlic Yogurt, and Paprika Butter Recipe (Piç Mantı)

After a breakup, comfort food is in order. Growing up in a half-Turkish household with an adventurous American cook for a mother, I am aware that my comfort food may be someone else’s challenge. I was born, and spent the first 18 months of my life in Turkey, and, as a baby, I rejected milk and adored yogurt, so consequently, many of my most soothing dishes involve it. Mantı is my favorite food of all time: a dish created by East Asians and introduced to Turkey by itinerant Turkic and Mongolian tribes, it consists of hand made dumplings filled with a mixture of ground lamb or ground beef, parsley and onion, and it is served with a warm garlic yogurt sauce, paprika butter drizzled on top. Because of the labor involved in making and rolling out the pasta dough, my mother copied a friend’s version, and used pre-made dried pasta from the store. Because it isn’t true mantı, my parents’ friends named this iteration piç mantı, or bastardized mantı, and this is the name I knew it by, even as a small child.

Two weeks ago, in the midst of a life change, I couldn’t cook. At the Union Square market I decided that I would purchase things that I could simply cut and eat, no cooking involved. I bought whole grain organic bread, to cut and toast, and added heirloom tomatoes, to cut and put on the bread with a little olive oil and sea salt. I bought some raw milk cheddar cheese to eat with those tomatoes and bread, and Persian cucumbers, to eat whole. I found some organic purslane, one of the most nutritious plants in the world, containing even Omega 3s, that I would wash, and eat entire stems of out of the refrigerator. Same with some purple kale. And I bought kimchee, rich in vitamin C, no cutting needed. Then I saw some grass fed ground beef and fresh goats’ milk yogurt, and comforting piç mantı was then added to the menu; I’d only have to cut the onions and parsley.

On a Turkish summer vacation once, when I was a child of about 7 or 8, and not knowing what the piç part of piç mantı meant, I returned home, confused and in near tears, after my Turkish friends made fun of me when I told them the name of my favorite food. Now I make both types of mantı, the hand rolled type when feeling ambitious, and the quick way when even cutting seems like a chore. Bastardized mantı, you did the trick: I’m in Lyon, France now, having just returned from the glorious market with plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables to cook up. This life is too beautiful for wallowing; onward!

Pasta with Ground Beef, Parsley, Garlic Yogurt, and Paprika Butter (Piç Mantı)

1 pound pasta shells (I used fusilli, because that’s what I had, but I prefer it with shells, because it holds the sauce better)

For the yogurt sauce:

1 quart yogurt (usually this dish is prepared with cows' milk yogurt, but I made it with goats’ milk this time, and it was fine, if a little more unusual)
1-2 cloves of fresh garlic, chopped (this is to your taste. I love garlic, so can add even more than 2 cloves. Use your judgment.)
Salt, to taste

For the meat mixture:

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 pound ground beef (or lamb)
1/2 cup flat leaf parsley, chopped
salt and pepper

For the butter topping:

2 tablespoons of butter
1 teaspoon paprika (or a little more, depending on your taste)

At the table:

I serve this with sumac, which can be purchased at Penzey’s, and with cayenne pepper. Some people like it with dried mint flakes. Serving all three at the table, so your guests can choose their own preferred combination would be ideal.

Put a large pot of salted water over high heat to boil.

Put a large bowl somewhere warm (I put it near the stove), and add the yogurt, garlic and salt to the bowl. Let it come to room temperature while you execute the other steps.

Heat a large skillet over medium high heat, add the onion, and let it cook until translucent, but not browned. Add the ground beef, and cook until browned. Turn off the heat, season with salt and pepper, and stir in the parsley.

When the pasta is cooked through (according to the package directions), remove from the heat, drain, and save a little of the cooking water for adding to the yogurt sauce.

Combine the pasta, yogurt sauce, a little of the pasta’s cooking water, and ground beef. Mix well.

Quickly, in a small saucepan, heat the butter and the paprika until sizzling. Serve the pasta, yogurt and meat mixture in individual bowls, and top each bowl with the sizzling paprika butter.

Serve with sumac, dried mint, and cayenne pepper.

Similar recipes from A Hungry Bear Won't Dance: Ground Beef and Herb Stuffed Eggplant, Tomato, and Zucchini (Etli Karışık Dolma), Conchiglie (Pasta Shells) with Gorgonzola and Garden Orache (or Radicchio) Recipe, Creamy, Thyme Scented Fusilli with Purple Asparagus, Green Peas, and Bacon

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