Eggs Beauregard
4 hard boiled eggs 6 squares of buttered toast 1 1/2 cup White Sauce No. 2 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Separate the yolks and whites; chop the whites fine. Lay the toast on a hot platter, cover with the white sauce, sprinkle with the chopped whites; lastly press the yolks through a ricer, sprinkle lightly over the chopped whites. Add the seasonings before serving.
A creamed-egg dish that depends entirely on a sauce the original expects you to have memorized. The White Sauce No. 2 is the whole recipe.
- White Sauce No. 2Numbered white sauces of this period generally run from thin to thick, and a medium white sauce is conventionally about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon; check the book's own No. 2 before scaling. On that ratio, 1 1/2 cups would take 3 tablespoons each butter and flour with 1 1/2 cups milk.
- Cook the rouxLet the butter and flour bubble a full minute or two before the milk goes in, and simmer the finished sauce a few minutes more. Raw flour is the usual failing of creamed-egg dishes and it tastes chalky under the eggs.
- Season the sauce, not the platterThe instruction to add salt and pepper before serving means dusting the assembled dish. Salt the sauce as it cooks instead, and use the 1/8 teaspoon pepper on top where it will be visible against the yellow.
- A ricerA fine-mesh sieve with the back of a spoon works, or the smallest holes of a box grater against a cold yolk. Chill the hard-boiled yolks first so they crumble rather than smear.
- Hard-boiled eggsBring the eggs to a boil, cover, take off the heat and let stand 10-12 minutes, then cool in cold water. Boiled hard for the fifteen minutes older books often direct, the yolks turn grey-green at the edge and the whites go rubbery.
- ToastThe book says only six squares and does not say how they are cut; slices trimmed square is the usual reading. Butter it hot and sauce it immediately before serving; toast under white sauce goes limp within a few minutes.
- YieldSix squares serves two or three at breakfast or lunch, with nothing else on the plate but perhaps bacon.
Dishes named Beauregard, after the Louisiana Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard, appear in American cookbooks of the early twentieth century, usually meaning eggs in cream sauce with the sieved yolks scattered over the top; the arrangement of white and yellow on the plate is generally said to echo military decoration, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. Creamed eggs on toast belonged to the same thrifty repertoire as creamed chipped beef and Welsh rarebit, a way to make a supper from a pint of milk, a spoon of flour and whatever was in the egg basket.