Lucanian Eggs
5 "hard-boiled" eggs 1 cup cooked macaroni 1/2 cup grated cheese Essence Anchovy 1 3/4 cups White Sauce I Salt and paprika Onion juice 3/4 cup buttered crumbs Cut eggs in eighths lengthwise, add macaroni, white sauce, and seasonings. Arrange in buttered baking dish, cover with buttered crumbs, and bake until crumbs are brown.
A baked egg-and-macaroni gratin from the era when a cook was expected to have white sauce and buttered crumbs already in her repertoire. The two things the original leaves unstated are the sauce and the oven.
- White Sauce IThe recipe leans on a numbered white sauce given elsewhere in the book, so check that entry rather than assume a thickness. A pourable sauce, roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons each butter and flour per cup of milk, suits the dish, since the crumbs and cheese thicken it further as it bakes.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. "Bake until crumbs are brown" implies a fairly hot oven working on an already-cooked filling, so about 400F for 20 to 25 minutes is a reasonable modern rendering. The dish only needs to heat through and colour on top; long baking makes hard-boiled egg white rubbery.
- Essence of anchovyA bottled anchovy extract sold by grocers, now uncommon in American shops though still made in Britain. Anchovy paste from a tube is the nearest substitute; start with half a teaspoon and taste, since strength varies between products.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, about a teaspoon. It was used where onion flavour was wanted without visible pieces; a pinch of onion powder does the same job less brightly.
- Buttered crumbsDry bread crumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly 3 tablespoons butter to 3/4 cup crumbs. Unbuttered crumbs scorch in patches instead of browning evenly.
- SaltSeason after the anchovy and cheese are in, not before. Between the two, the dish is often salty enough on its own.
- MacaroniOne cup cooked is a modest amount, from about 1/2 cup dry elbows. Cook it a minute short of done, as it will take up sauce in the oven.
- YieldFills a 1-quart baking dish and serves three or four as a light supper dish, two as a main course with bread and a salad.
The name points to Lucania, the old name for the region of southern Italy now largely Basilicata, and it most likely reached this book by way of lucanica, the seasoned sausage that Roman writers said the legions brought back from Lucanian country and which survives in the Italian luganega and Greek loukaniko. The link is traditional rather than documented here, since there is no sausage in the dish at all: what the title seems to signal to an American reader of about 1900 is simply "Italian-tasting" -- macaroni, grated cheese, a savoury anchovy note. That was how domestic-science cookery of the period handled foreign names, borrowing them for effect while keeping the method firmly within the white-sauce-and-buttered-crumbs system that governed nearly every baked dish in these books. Hard-boiled eggs stretched with pasta and a cheap sauce also did real work in a household economy where eggs were plentiful and meat was not.