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EGGS (a la Maitre d'Hotel)
Slice and fry some Spanish onions in butter, but do not let them brown. Add a little flour, some hot milk, chopped parsley, salt, and white pepper, and let the sauce thicken. Cut into quarters some eggs that have been boiled for ten minutes, lay them in the sauce, and when hot, arrange the eggs neatly in a dish and pour the sauce over them.
A plain onion béchamel poured over hard-boiled eggs. The recipe gives no quantities at all, which is typical of Cassell's shorter entries, so the proportions below are the ones the method implies.
- Working quantitiesFor four eggs, allow one medium Spanish onion, about 1 oz (2 tbsp) butter, 1 oz (scant 1/4 cup) flour and 1/2 pint hot milk (10 imperial fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups). That should give a sauce thick enough to coat rather than pool.
- The hinge: keep the onions paleThe instruction not to let them brown is the whole character of the dish. Sweat the sliced onion in butter over low heat, covered, until translucent and soft, 10-15 minutes. Any colour turns this into a different, sweeter sauce.
- Cook out the flourOnce the flour goes in, stir it over low heat for two or three minutes before the milk. Skipping this leaves a raw, pasty taste that the mild onion has nothing to hide behind.
- Hot milk, added graduallyThe direction to use hot milk is deliberate: it keeps the sauce from seizing into lumps around the cool onion and flour. Add it in stages, beating smooth each time.
- Ten minutes is too long for the eggsTen minutes is longer than needed -- A full ten-minute boil tends towards the grey-green ring at the yolk and a chalky texture, especially if the eggs are left to cool slowly. Eight to nine minutes in water at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives a firm yolk that still quarters cleanly.
- Reheating the eggsLay the quarters in the finished sauce and warm them through only; two or three minutes off a hard boil. Simmering hard-boiled whites toughens them and they will start to break apart in the sauce.
- Parsley lastChopped parsley stirred in at the end keeps its colour and flavour. Added with the milk and simmered, it goes drab.
- Yield and servingFour eggs serve two as a light supper dish with toast, or four as a savoury course. Season the sauce assertively with salt before it meets the bland eggs.
À la maître d'hôtel — literally master of the house, the steward — usually means the simplest possible treatment finished with parsley: a butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice and seasoning, slid onto a grilled steak or boiled potatoes. Here Cassell's stretches the term to cover a white onion sauce carrying the same parsley, which shows how loosely these French service names travelled into English domestic cookery by the later nineteenth century. The dish itself belongs to a large family of Victorian egg entries built for economy and for using up what the larder held; hard-boiled eggs in a flour-thickened milk sauce appear under a variety of names across the period's manuals. Spanish onions were specified because they were the large, mild, sweet sort sold in British markets from imports, and their gentleness suits a sauce that is not allowed to brown.