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Egg Sauce for Calf's Head
Take half a pint of veal or any white broth, thicken it with two ounces of butter blended with an ounce and a half of flour; add, when it boils, some minced parsley, three eggs boiled hard and chopped separately, and a squeeze of lemon-juice. Take the sauce off the fire, and stir into it another ounce of butter. Serve in a tureen. If liked, the egg-whites only may be stirred into the sauce; the hard yolks may be pressed through a wire sieve on to the meat.
A hard-boiled egg sauce built on a plain white roux, meant to go with boiled calf's head but equally at home with poached chicken, boiled fish or salt beef. The proportions are generous with butter and want a little care at the end.
- Half a pintCassell's is measuring in imperial pints of 20 fluid ounces, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups. That is a small quantity of liquid against 3 oz of butter in total and 1½ oz of flour, and the finished sauce will be thick and coating rather than pourable.
- The roux'Butter blended with flour' is ambiguous here: it may mean a cooked roux or a raw kneaded paste worked into the hot broth. If you cook the flour in the butter for a couple of minutes over low heat before the broth goes in, the sauce is less likely to taste of raw flour.
- Chopped separatelyThis is the instruction that matters. The whites and yolks of the hard-boiled eggs are chopped apart, not together, so the whites stay in visible flecks and the yolks either dissolve into the sauce or, in the variation, go through a sieve over the meat as a garnish.
- The final butterThe last ounce of butter is stirred in off the heat to gloss and enrich the sauce. Once it is in, do not let the sauce boil again; it will separate.
- White brothA light unsalted veal or chicken stock, ideally the cooking liquor from the calf's head or whatever meat the sauce accompanies. Modern boxed stock is usually salted, so taste before adding any salt of your own.
- EggsThree eggs into 1¼ cups of sauce is a lot of solid matter. Cook them until just set through — 9 to 10 minutes from boiling, then straight into cold water — so the yolks stay yellow rather than turning grey and chalky.
- YieldRoughly 1½ cups once the eggs are in, enough for four to six as an accompanying sauce. It thickens as it stands; loosen with a little more broth if it sits before serving.
Boiled calf's head was a fixture of nineteenth-century English cookery — cheap, gelatinous, and served whole or boned and rolled — and it was often sent to table with a sauce of this kind, along with the brains dressed separately. Egg sauce belongs to a family of plain English white sauces that survive today mainly in the parsley sauce served with ham and the egg sauce eaten with smoked haddock or salt cod. The base is a white roux slackened with broth and finished with butter; learn it once and the variations are a matter of what you stir in at the end. The dish itself faded with the offal trade: calf's head largely disappeared from British and American butchers' counters over the twentieth century, taking its sauce with it.