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Roman Sauce
Put one tea-cup water and one tea-cup milk on fire to seald, and when hot stir in a table-spoon flour, previously mixed smooth with a very little cold water, add three eggs well beaten and strained, season with salt and pepper, two table-spoons butter and a little vinegar; boil four eggs hard, slice and lay over the dish; pour over sauce, and serve with boiled fish. - Mrs. E. T. E.
A flour-thickened egg sauce for poached fish, in the family of the old English egg sauces dressed up with a continental name. The whole thing turns on temperature control after the eggs go in.
- The hinge: do not let it boil once the eggs are inThree beaten eggs stirred into hot liquid will scramble if the pan goes above roughly 180F. Take the pan off direct heat, temper the eggs with a ladle of the hot milk mixture first, then return it and stir over low heat until it coats a spoon.
- TeacupThe teacup is not a standardized measure; it is often read as about three-quarters of a cup, though a full cup is also possible. Either reading works here, so long as water and milk are equal.
- "Seald"Scalded, meaning heated to just below a simmer, when small bubbles ring the edge of the pan. It is not a boil.
- Strain the eggsThe instruction is doing real work: straining removes the chalazae, which otherwise show up as white threads in a pale sauce. Strain again after cooking if the heat got away from you.
- Add the vinegar lastAcid poured into hot dairy encourages curdling. Stir it in off the heat at the end, a teaspoon at a time, tasting as you go; the original gives no quantity beyond "a little."
- The flourOne tablespoon into the two teacups of liquid plus the eggs is a light thickening only. The eggs do most of the work. Mix the flour to a slurry with cold water as directed to avoid lumps.
- The four hard-boiled eggsThese are sliced and laid in the dish before the sauce is poured over, not stirred into the sauce; the recipe says 'lay over the dish.' Sliced hard-boiled egg under or over a pale sauce was a common way of dressing boiled fish.
- YieldAbout two cups of sauce. Serve it hot; it thickens and skins over as it cools.
Egg sauce for boiled fish is an old Anglo-American standby, and nineteenth-century community cookbooks are full of variations on it: milk or cream thickened with a little flour, enriched with eggs and butter, sharpened with vinegar or lemon, and finished with sliced hard-boiled egg over the platter. What is notable here is the name. Buckeye Cookery, first published in Ohio in 1877 as a fundraising compilation of contributions from Methodist households, carries a number of sauces under grand continental names; no Italian original for a "Roman" sauce of this kind has been identified, and the title may simply reflect the period's habit of borrowing continental prestige for a domestic preparation. The initials at the end are typical of the book's format, which credits many contributors by name or initials.