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Creamed Eggs
Make a Cream Sauce of two tablespoons of butter, two of flour, one pint of milk. Add to this six hard-boiled eggs cut into slices, and heat thoroughly.
A plain white sauce with sliced hard-boiled eggs folded in, meant for the chafing dish at supper or after the theatre. The whole dish stands or falls on the sauce, which the original assumes you can make without being told.
- ProportionsTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to a pint of milk is on the thin side by the usual reckoning (a medium white sauce is generally two tablespoons of each per cup): it coats lightly but stays quite pourable. If you want it to hold on toast without running, closer to four tablespoons of each will do it.
- Cook the flourLet the butter and flour bubble together two or three minutes before the milk goes in, or the sauce tastes of raw paste. Add the milk in stages, whisking smooth each time, and simmer until it thickens visibly.
- SeasoningThe original lists none; recipes of this date often left salt and pepper for the cook to supply. A pint of sauce needs roughly three-quarters of a teaspoon of salt; a grating of nutmeg is period-appropriate.
- Chafing dish versus stoveThe recipe itself says nothing about the equipment. If you do serve it from a chafing dish, note that over a spirit lamp the sauce scorches easily and the flame is hard to regulate: make the sauce in a saucepan on the stove, then transfer it to the chafing dish over hot water to hold and serve.
- Adding the eggsFold the slices in off the heat or on the gentlest heat and warm through only, two or three minutes. Held at a simmer the yolks go chalky and the whites turn rubbery, and the slices break apart into a mash.
- SlicingAn egg slicer or a thin wet knife keeps the yolks intact. Peel the eggs while still warm and chill them before slicing if you want clean rounds.
- Yield and servingSix eggs in a pint of sauce serves four to six over buttered toast, split biscuits or rice. It does not reheat well; the eggs toughen the second time.
This comes from Rufus Estes's Good Things to Eat (1911), the cookbook of a man born into slavery in Tennessee in 1857 who went on to cook for Pullman's private railroad cars and later for the executives of a Chicago steel company. The chafing dish was at a peak of fashion around the time he wrote: a spirit-lamp burner and a water-jacketed pan let a hostess cook at the table without servants, and publishers turned out whole volumes of chafing-dish cookery for late suppers and bachelor entertaining. Creamed eggs belong to the cheap, quick end of that repertoire, closely related to the creamed dishes that made a white sauce the backbone of American cooking well into the twentieth century. Estes writes for a reader who already knows what cream sauce is, which is why the recipe is two sentences long.