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Creamed Eggs for Luncheon
One-half dozen hard boiled eggs cut in halves. Make a white sauce as follows: Two teaspoons of butter, two level tablespoons of flour; melt butter and stir in flour, then add slowly one-half pint of milk, seasoning with salt and pepper and a little celery if desired.
Pour over eggs and serve in dish garnished with parsley. -Mrs Scot Butler
A plain thin white sauce over halved hard-cooked eggs, of the kind that filled the luncheon column of every American cookbook of the period. The whole thing takes fifteen minutes, and it rewards attention to two things: the sauce and the eggs.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. With two level tablespoons of flour that gives a light pouring sauce rather than a thick binding one, which is what is wanted here.
- The butter is shortTwo teaspoons of butter to two tablespoons of flour is less fat than flour by volume, so the roux will be dry and crumbly. Modern practice uses equal parts, so two tablespoons butter to two tablespoons flour; the sauce will be smoother and less pasty.
- Cook the flourLet the butter and flour bubble together a minute or two before the milk goes in, then add the milk gradually off the heat and whisk. Sauce that tastes of raw flour is the usual failure of this dish.
- "A little celery"Ambiguous in the original. It may mean celery salt or celery seed, both available at the time; a tablespoon of very finely minced celery cooked in the butter first also works. If using celery salt, cut back the plain salt.
- Hard-cooked eggsBring to a boil, cover, take off the heat and leave ten to twelve minutes, then cool in cold water. Eggs held at a rolling boil for a quarter of an hour come out rubbery with a green ring around the yolk.
- YieldSix eggs and a cup of sauce serves three at lunch, or four if there is toast under it. Buttered toast, split biscuits or rice all suit it.
- Serve at onceWhite sauce skins over and eggs cool fast. Warm the serving dish, sauce the eggs at the last minute, and add the parsley as it goes to the table.
Creamed eggs belong to the era when "luncheon" was a distinct meal with its own recipes, lighter than dinner, served to women at home or at club gatherings. The dish is really an exercise in white sauce, the foundation the domestic-science movement of the 1890s and 1900s taught first and drilled hardest; once a cook could make it, creamed eggs, creamed chicken, creamed oysters and creamed potatoes all followed from the same pan. Contributed recipes signed with a married name, as this one is, were the backbone of community and society cookbooks of the period, where the attribution served as both credit and endorsement among readers who knew one another.