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Escalloped Eggs
8 Hard-cooked Eggs 2 Cupfuls Cream or White Sauce No. 2 1½ Cupful Coarse Bread Crumbs 1/2 Tablespoonfuls Melted Snowdrift Lightly rub a baking-dish with Snowdrift. Put a layer of the sliced, hardcooked eggs in the bottom, pour over a little of the white sauce, and continue in this way until all is used. Cover the top with the crumbs, lightly mixed with the Snowdrift, and place in a hot oven, 375 degrees F., to brown. If desired, a little minced green pepper, or parsley, or finelyground celery may be stirred into the sauce.
A plain layered egg gratin that depends almost entirely on the sauce. Two things need translating: the shortening brand in every line, and the cross-reference to a white sauce recipe you do not have.
- White Sauce No. 2In books of this era numbered white sauces usually run from thin to thick, so No. 2 is most likely the medium one: roughly 2 tablespoons fat and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together and whisked with 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt and a little pepper. Double it for the 2 cupfuls called for. Cook it until it coats a spoon and no longer tastes of raw flour, since it gets no further thickening in the dish.
- SnowdriftA hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and the reason this book exists. Butter is the better choice in both of its uses here -- greasing the dish and, especially, the crumbs; a neutral shortening contributes nothing to a dish this bland.
- The ambiguous crumb measure"1/2 Tablespoonfuls Melted Snowdrift" is almost certainly a typesetting slip for 1 1/2 tablespoonfuls. Half a tablespoon will not coat half a cup of coarse crumbs; use enough melted butter that the crumbs are evenly damp and no more.
- Coarse bread crumbsNot the fine dry canister kind. Tear day-old bread and pulse it briefly, or grate it, so the pieces are pea-sized and brown into a crisp lid rather than a paste.
- Oven and timing375F is given. Twenty to twenty-five minutes brings the sauce to a bubble at the edges and colors the top; if the crumbs are pale when the dish is hot through, finish it a minute or two under the broiler.
- Slicing the eggsCut them a little thicker than you think, about a quarter inch. Thin slices slump into the sauce and the dish loses the layered texture that is its only structure.
- Yield and servingEight eggs and a pint of sauce serve four as a light supper or six alongside ham or toast. Dishes of this kind were generally treated as a light or meatless supper rather than a main course.
- The optional additionsTake them up. Minced green pepper, parsley or celery, and a grating of sharp cheese or a spoonful of mustard in the sauce, all correct the flatness that plain white sauce and hard eggs otherwise deliver.
This is a promotional cookbook: Snowdrift was a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening marketed by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and books like this one existed to teach cooks to reach for it wherever a recipe had previously said butter or lard. Cottonseed oil was a byproduct of the Southern cotton crop, and its conversion into a solid white kitchen fat in the early twentieth century was one of the more consequential changes in American cooking. The dish itself is generic an escallop, meaning anything layered with sauce and crumbs and browned and hard-cooked eggs in white sauce were a standard of Friday and Lenten cookery, and of any household stretching a small amount of food across a table. The suggestion at the end to stir in green pepper, parsley or celery is a fair measure of the period's seasoning ambitions.