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Egg Sauce (Teaspoon salt teaspoon pepper)
1/2 teaspoon salt. 1/8 teaspoon pepper. 4 hard-cooked eggs.
Parsley finely chopped.
PROCESS: Melt one-half the butter in a sauce-pan, add flour mixed with seasonings, pour on slowly hot water, stirring constantly. Boil five minutes, then add remaining butter in small bits. Continue stirring. Add hot cream and two eggs chopped moderately. Garnish with remaining eggs. Pour sauce around fish and sprinkle with parsley.
This is the classic egg sauce for boiled fish, and the printed ingredient list has been cut short — only the salt, pepper, eggs and parsley survive. A few notes before you start.
- Missing quantitiesThe butter, flour, hot water and cream are called for in the method but their amounts are absent from this page. A drawn-butter sauce of the period runs about 4 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour and 2 cups liquid; treat that as a reconstruction, not the book's figure.
- That teaspoon of pepperA full teaspoon of pepper against half a teaspoon of salt is a strong ratio, and may be a printer's transposition of the two. Season the roux lightly and correct at the end.
- Water first, cream lastThe flour is cooked in hot water and boiled five minutes, which is what sets the starch and kills any raw-flour taste. The cream goes in at the finish and should only be heated through — a hard boil after the cream will thin the sauce and can curdle it.
- Butter in bits, off the boilButter in bits -- Holding back half the butter and beating it in a few pieces at a time is the technique now called monter au beurre; the recipe does not say to take the pan off the heat, but easing it off direct heat helps the butter emulsify rather than separating.
- Hard-cooked eggsTwelve minutes in barely simmering water, then straight into cold water; overcooked yolks turn grey-green and chalky. Chop two moderately for the sauce, as directed, and use the other two whole or cut as you like for the garnish.
- Yield and servingIf made to the reconstructed quantities suggested above, roughly two cups; the page itself gives no yield. Pour it around the fish rather than over it, as directed.
Egg sauce is the standard English and American accompaniment to boiled or baked white fish — cod, haddock, halibut, salmon — and appears in many nineteenth-century household manuals, usually as a variation under "drawn butter." Its logic is economic as much as culinary: a plainly cooked fish was cheap, and the sauce supplied the richness, with butter, cream and eggs doing the work that a stock-based sauce would do in a professional kitchen. Boiled fish was a familiar enough dish that a sauce like this was worth having on hand. The method here — flour cooked in water, with cream and butter added — is the older Anglo-American way, generally said to predate the milk-based white sauce associated with Fannie Farmer and the cooking-school writers.