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Eggs a Ia Goldenrod
3 "hard-boiled" eggs 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 5 slices toast Parsley Make a thin white sauce with butter, flour, milk, and seasonings. Separate yolks from whites of eggs. Chop whites finely, and add them to the sauce. Cut four slices of toast in halves lengthwise. Arrange on platter, and pour over the sauce. Force the yolks through a potato ricer or strainer, sprinkling over the top. Garnish with parsley and remaining toast, cut in points.
A plain white sauce dressed up with chopped egg white and a snow of riced yolk. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the eggs are cooked, and the only technical demand is a smooth sauce.
- The sauce is the hingeCook the butter and flour together for a minute before adding milk, then add the milk gradually and whisk until it thickens and loses any raw-flour taste. A "thin" white sauce in this period means roughly 1 tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk, as given here; it should coat a spoon lightly and pour freely over toast rather than mound on it.
- Hard-boiled eggsCover eggs with cold water, bring to a boil, cover and take off the heat for about 10 minutes, then cool in cold water. The quotation marks around "hard-boiled" in the original may reflect the period argument that eggs are better cooked below boiling; long hard boiling gives rubbery whites and a green ring on the yolk.
- Riced yolksThe yolks must be fully cold and dry or they will smear rather than pass through the ricer. A fine mesh sieve pushed with the back of a spoon works as well as a potato ricer.
- ToastCut and arrange the toast at the last moment. Sauce sits on hot, dry, fairly firm toast without collapsing it; soft sandwich bread lightly browned will go to paste within a minute.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt to one cup of milk is on the generous side by modern taste when the toast is also salted. Season the sauce, taste, and adjust before the egg whites go in.
- YieldRoughly two servings as a main dish, or four at breakfast; the recipe gives no yield of its own. It does not hold or reheat; make it to be eaten immediately.
Eggs à la Goldenrod, sometimes just goldenrod eggs, appears in American cooking-school teaching around the turn of the twentieth century, and turns up in school and church cookbooks into the mid-century. The name is generally taken to be visual: the sieved yolk scattered over white sauce was thought to resemble the yellow plumes of goldenrod. It drills two basic lessons at once, a roux-thickened white sauce and the hard-cooked egg, while using cheap and widely available ingredients. Dishes of this kind, built on sauce and toast, appear in the Sunday supper and invalid-cookery sections of household manuals of the period, when a hot dish that used no meat and no oven was worth having in the repertoire.