Egg Sauce
Make the White Sauce and into the quantity made by the fore going recipe cut two hard-boiled eggs. This sauce is very good with boiled fish.
A two-line derivative recipe that depends entirely on the white sauce it sits beneath. The whole dish is a cup or so of béchamel with chopped hard-boiled egg folded in, so the base sauce is where the attention goes.
- The base sauceWhite sauce of this period is commonly around one tablespoon butter, one tablespoon flour and one cup of milk, cooked until the flour loses its raw taste, though the foregoing recipe's own quantities are not repeated here. If you make a larger batch than the recipe behind this one, add eggs in proportion rather than by the fixed number of two.
- Cook the roux before the milk goes inTwo or three minutes of butter and flour bubbling together over low heat is what separates a clean-tasting sauce from a pasty one. It should stay pale — no colour at all for a sauce meant to go over white fish.
- Add the eggs off the heatFold the chopped egg in at the last moment and only warm it through. Held at a simmer, the yolk crumbles into the sauce and turns it grainy and sulphurous.
- Chop, don't minceQuarter-inch pieces stay visible and give the sauce its texture. Sieving the yolk in and cutting only the white is an alternative that gives a richer, yellower body.
- Seasoning the original leaves outSeasoning -- These two lines mention none, though the white sauce behind them may already be seasoned: salt, white pepper and a little lemon juice or a grating of nutmeg. With boiled fish, lemon is the more useful of the two.
- YieldDepends on the batch of white sauce it is added to; a cup of sauce will cover roughly four modest portions of fish. It thickens as it stands; loosen with a spoonful of milk or of the fish cooking liquid.
Good Things to Eat (1911) was written by Rufus Estes, who was born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857 and spent much of his career cooking in Pullman dining cars before moving to the subsidiary of U.S. Steel in Chicago; his book is generally recognized as one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American author. Egg sauce belongs to the family of small variations on white sauce that commonly filled the sauce chapters of professional and domestic cookbooks of the era, with capers, oysters or egg depending on what it was to accompany. The pairing with boiled fish is older than the book: plainly poached cod, haddock or salmon was standard in British and American kitchens, and a bland fish cooked in water needed both the fat and the visual interest that chopped egg in cream sauce supplied. Estes assumes the reader has already learned the mother sauce and needs only to be told what to put in it.