Egg Sauce
Make a white sauce and add to it hard-boiled eggs chopped fine. This is nice with fish. 1
A two-line recipe that assumes you already know how to make a white sauce, which most cooks in 1900 did. The proportions below are the standard ones of the period.
- The white sauceEqual measures of butter and flour cooked together, then milk whisked in: 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to 1 cup milk gives a sauce that coats a spoon. Cook the roux a minute or two before adding liquid so the sauce does not taste of raw flour.
- Egg proportionTwo hard-boiled eggs to a cup of sauce is a generous and commonly used proportion. Chop rather than mash, or the sauce turns to paste and loses the point of the dish.
- Add the eggs off heatThis is the hinge. Stir the chopped egg in at the last moment, off the burner. Held over heat the whites toughen and squeak, and the yolks cloud the sauce.
- Boiling the eggsModern practice is shorter than was once usual: bring to a boil, cover, take off the heat and leave 10 minutes, then cool in cold water. The long boils often called for in older books produce the grey-green ring around the yolk.
- SeasoningThe original leaves it unsaid. Salt, white pepper, and a spoonful of lemon juice or a little chopped parsley are usual; a pinch of dry mustard or a scrape of nutmeg also suits it.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter of finished sauce, enough for four moderate portions of fish.
- What to serve it withIntended for plain poached or boiled fish — cod, haddock, salmon — and equally at home on salt cod or steamed vegetables. Thin with a little of the fish cooking liquid if the sauce stiffens as it stands.
Egg sauce belongs to the long English tradition of dressing plain boiled fish with a thickened milk sauce, and it appears in American household manuals of the late nineteenth century as one of a family of variations on drawn butter or white sauce — parsley sauce, caper sauce, oyster sauce, egg sauce — all built from the same base with one addition. Its persistence owed much to the New England salt-cod dinner, where hard-boiled egg and cream sauce were often the accompaniment, and to Lenten and Friday menus in which cheap boiled fish needed enriching. The brevity of the entry is itself informative: such a cookbook could assume white sauce was already learned by heart, and reserved its words for the one thing that made this version different.