Scrambled Eggs, Princess Mary

Œufs brouillés Princess Mary (soft scrambled eggs in puff-pastry timbales) teaches the discipline of readiness. Before you touch the egg pan, know the one true thing: every pastry case must be baked, unmoulded, and waiting. The eggs will give you no useful pause once they begin to set.

The original assumes a pastry station with puff-paste scraps and fancy cutters, dariole moulds at hand, and a saucier beside a stockpot that never went cold. At home, chilled all-butter puff pastry supplies the scraps, standard metal muffin wells can stand in for the little baba-shaped moulds, and a measured quarter-cup of stock becomes exactly the reduced velouté required. Eight timbales make a service for four. Separate pastry and sauce stations are brigade scaffolding and can go; the pale hollow cases, the two tablespoonfuls of velouté, the truffle, and the off-fire finish must stay. One cook, one stove, one evening.

The finished timbales should be crisp but barely coloured, their lids faintly gilded, with glossy eggs and black truffle just visible when one is lifted. Stop scrambling while the eggs still flow slowly from the spatula. That is the step that decides the dish.