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Savory Egg Sauce
1 Cupful Cream or White Sauce No. 2 1 Tablespoonful Green Pepper, Ground 1/2 Tablespoonful Minced Parsley 1 Hard-cooked Egg, Sliced ¼ Teaspoonful Salt Few Grains Pepper ⅛ Teaspoonful Paprika Combine the ingredients in the order given, reheat and use with fish, boiled lamb, on toast, with stewed chicken, with potato croquettes or with boiled rice, samp, macaroni, or spaghetti.
A cupful of white sauce dressed up with egg, parsley and sweet pepper — the kind of all-purpose sauce that a 1910s kitchen kept in rotation. The printed fractions have suffered in transcription, and one ingredient reference points to another page of the original book.
- The fractionsThe printed page gives a quarter teaspoon of salt and an eighth of a teaspoon of paprika, as the text now reads. That seasoning is right for a single cup of sauce.
- White Sauce No. 2The numbered white sauce is on another page of the original and is not reproduced here. In books of this era the numbered sauces generally run from thin to thick, so No. 2 is most likely the medium one: on the order of 2 tablespoons fat and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together with 1 cup milk, simmered until it coats a spoon. The recipe allows plain cream in its place, in which case the sauce will be thin.
- The fat the book meansThe fat -- Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening, so if the white sauce on the referenced page uses it, butter can be substituted for better flavor, bearing in mind that butter carries water and milk solids and will not behave in exactly the same way.
- "Green Pepper, Ground"A raw sweet green bell pepper put through a food chopper — not a dried ground pepper and not a chili. A tablespoon of very finely minced bell pepper is the equivalent. Softening it in the butter before adding the flour removes the raw grassy edge, which the original does not bother to do.
- Add the egg last, off the heatThe egg -- The original lists the sliced egg before the seasonings and simply says to combine and reheat. In practice, treat "reheat" as warming through only: once the sliced hard-cooked egg is in, boiling or vigorous stirring will shred the white and make the yolk grainy. Bring the sauce to a bare simmer, fold in the egg, serve.
- SampCoarsely broken hulled corn, related to hominy and coarser than grits, and largely gone from supermarkets. Grits, polenta or plain boiled rice stand in for it.
- YieldAbout a generous cup, enough to sauce four modest portions of fish or chicken. It does not hold or reheat well a second time — the egg suffers.
This appears to be promotional cookery, of the kind issued by shortening makers to show home cooks that a vegetable fat could do everything butter and lard did, sauces included. The sauce itself is older than any such shortening. Egg sauce chopped or sliced hard-cooked egg in a plain white sauce — was the standard accompaniment to boiled and salt fish in nineteenth-century British and American kitchens, and it survives in that role in New England cod cookery. What marks this version as early twentieth century is the long list of suggested uses and the paprika and green pepper, both often said to be fashionable additions of the 1900s and 1910s.