Scalloped Eggs
6 hard boiled eggs 2 cups White Sauce No. 2 1/2 cup cracker crumbs 4 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon chopped parsley Mix the cracker crumbs in the melted butter; slice the eggs into a buttered baking pan, add seasonings and the parsley minced fine; pour the white sauce over the eggs and sprinkle the top with the buttered cracker crumbs. Cook in a moderate over for ten minutes. Use 1 cup of scalded oysters to alternate with eggs, and cover with white sauce.
White stock may be used instead of milk for making the sauce, 2 tablespoons of cheese or 1 teaspoon of onion juice may be substituted for parsley.
A simple supper dish that assumes you already know the book's numbered white sauce. Everything else is straightforward once the sauce and the oven are pinned down.
- White Sauce No. 2In cookbooks of this period the numbered white sauces usually run from thin to thick, and a No. 2 is generally the medium one, in the region of 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together per cup of milk, seasoned with salt. For 2 cups, that is 4 tablespoons of each -- but check the book's own sauce list, since the numbering varies between books. It should coat a spoon but still pour.
- A moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere in the 350-375F range. The dish contains nothing raw, so the ten minutes is only to heat it through and set the crumbs.
- Getting colour on topTen minutes at 350F will not brown buttered crumbs. Finish under the broiler for a minute or two, watching it, or the top stays pale and greasy.
- Cracker crumbsSoda crackers or saltines, crushed to coarse crumbs rather than dust. Four tablespoons of butter to half a cup of crumbs is generous; the crumbs should be damp and clumping, not swimming.
- SaltA full teaspoon assumes an unsalted or lightly salted white sauce and unsalted crackers. Taste the sauce first and cut back accordingly.
- The oyster variationScalded means just until the edges curl, under two minutes in their own liquor. They then get another ten minutes in the oven, so any further cooking beforehand turns them tough.
- White stockAn unsalted light chicken or veal stock. It makes a thinner, savourier sauce; a stock-based version benefits from a spoonful of cream at the end.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve. A teaspoon is about half a small onion.
- YieldSix eggs in two cups of sauce serves three to four as a light main course, or six as a side.
Scalloped dishes — anything sliced, sauced, crumbed and baked in a shallow pan — were the backbone of American church-supper and luncheon cookery around 1900, and numbered white sauces were common in the cookery writing of the era, so a recipe could simply say "No. 2" and be understood. Hard-boiled eggs in cream sauce belonged to the same thrifty tradition as creamed chipped beef and salmon loaf: cheap protein stretched with milk and flour, and dressed up with parsley, cheese or onion juice depending on what the house had. That flour milling companies published cook books at all reflects the period's marketing logic.[The typo "moderate over" is in the original printing.]</p>