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Egg Sauce (To Drawn Butter Sauce add)
To Drawn Butter Sauce add one-half teaspoon Anchovy Essence and two hard-cooked eggs cut in thin slices. Sprinkle all with finely chopped parsley. (For Drawn Butter Sauce see Page 92.)
A two-ingredient addition to a base sauce, and the base is where all the technique lives. Assume roughly a cup of drawn butter sauce, which is what a period recipe of that name yields.
- What drawn butter sauce isNot clarified butter. In American books of this era it means a light sauce built on butter, flour and boiling water; proportions vary from book to book, but something like 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour cooked together, a cup or so of hot water whisked in and simmered a few minutes, finished with more butter off the heat, will give the right thing. Milk-based bechamel works if you want a richer sauce, but it is a different thing.
- Anchovy essenceA bottled Victorian condiment of anchovy, salt and spice, still sold in Britain. Anchovy paste from a tube is the closest substitute at the same measure; a single oil-packed fillet mashed to a paste also works. Worcestershire sauce is not a swap — too much vinegar and tamarind.
- Add the eggs last, off the heatSlice the hard-cooked eggs and fold them in after the sauce is off the burner. Any stirring over heat breaks the whites into shreds and clouds the sauce, which defeats the point of slicing them thinly.
- Cooking the eggsTwelve minutes for large eggs, then straight into cold water. An overcooked yolk with a grey ring will chalk the sauce and show as a green line in every slice.
- SaltAnchovy essence is very salty. Season the drawn butter lightly, or not at all, until the essence is in and tasted.
- Yield and what to serve it withAbout a cup and a half with the eggs folded in — enough for four servings of fish. This is the standard sauce for boiled or baked cod, haddock, salmon and salt fish, and it also goes on boiled fowl.
- Holding itThe sauce thickens and skins as it cools. Keep it over hot, not boiling, water and press plastic wrap or a butter paper on the surface; add the eggs and parsley only at the moment of serving.
Egg sauce is a thrifty sauce: flour, water, butter and two eggs turned plain boiled cod into a dish. The anchovy essence here is the giveaway of period taste harvey's sauce, mushroom catsup, anchovy essence, bottled fish condiments were the standard way a home cook added savoury depth long before monosodium glutamate reached domestic kitchens. Elizabeth O. Hiller, who compiled 52 Sunday Dinners (1913), was writing for households that needed the sauce to carry the meal, which is why the book cross-references a base sauce on page 92 rather than repeating it: drawn butter was the workhorse from which a dozen variations ehind egg, caper, lobster, parsley ehind were spun off.