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Boiled Eggs with Cream Sauce
Take as many eggs as you require, boil them hard, cut each in half; cut from the end a piece so they will stand alone; make a sauce of milk, tablespoon of butter, pepper and salt. When milk boils thicken with cornstarch, throw over eggs and serve. Nice dish for tea.
— Mrs. Martha Martin
— Mrs. Michael Schubert
A hard-boiled egg supper dish from the era when "tea" meant a light evening meal. The recipe assumes you know the proportions for a white sauce, so those need filling in.
- Sauce proportionsFor 6 eggs, use 1 cup milk, 1 tablespoon butter, and about 1 tablespoon cornstarch slaked in a little cold milk. Cornstarch thickens fast and fully at the boil, so add it off the heat as a slurry and return to a simmer for a minute to lose the raw starch taste.
- Cornstarch, not flourA cornstarch-bound sauce is glossier and thinner-bodied than a flour roux, and it breaks down if held hot for long or reheated. Make it just before serving.
- Boiling the eggsThe recipe says only "boil them hard," with no time given; a long hard boil is what produces the grey-green ring and rubbery white. Twelve minutes in barely simmering water, then straight into cold water, gives a firm yolk without the sulphur.
- Trimming the halvesThe instruction to cut a slice off the end so each half stands upright is the point of the dish: the halves sit cut-side up on the plate and hold the sauce. This implies cutting the eggs across rather than lengthwise, so that the rounded end can be trimmed flat.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper are the whole of it as written. A grating of nutmeg, a spoonful of mustard, or chopped parsley are all period-appropriate additions if the sauce tastes flat.
- Yield and servingTwo eggs, or four halves, per person, on buttered toast to catch the sauce. Serves 3 as a light supper from 6 eggs.
Eggs under a white sauce were a fixture of the American supper table through the second half of the nineteenth century, when the evening meal in many households was "tea" — cold meat, bread and butter, preserves and one hot dish. Hard-boiled eggs in cream sauce filled that hot-dish slot cheaply, using two things a farming family would have on hand from its own hens and cow. The use of cornstarch rather than a flour roux is suggestive of date: commercially refined cornstarch became widely available in American kitchens after the mid-1800s and was marketed as a modern convenience, though flour remained the usual thickener for white sauces well beyond that. That the contribution carries two women's names may suggest a receipt common enough locally that more than one household claimed it.