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Beauregard Eggs (1 tablespoonful of corn starch)
1 tablespoonful of corn starch Lump of butter, size of a 5 squares of toast 1/2 pint of milk Lump of butter, size of a walnut Salt and pepper to taste Cover the eggs with boiling water and boil for twenty minutes. Take off their shells, chop the whites fine and rub the yolks through a sieve. Do not mix them. Now put the milk on to boil, rub the butter and corn starch together, and add to the boiling milk. Now add the whites, salt and pepper. Put the toast on a hot dish, cover it with a layer of this white sauce, then a layer of the yolks, then the remainder of the whites, and then the remainder of the yolks. Sprinkle the top with a little salt and pepper, stand in the oven for a minute or two, and serve. This is good and sightly. 12 eggs
The ingredient list has come through garbled — a printer's or scanner's collapse of two columns — but the method is intact and the dish is simply creamed egg whites and sieved yolks layered over toast. A few numbers need pinning down before you start.
- The quantities, as far as they can be readLegible are 1 tablespoon cornstarch, 1/2 pint (1 cup) milk, butter the size of a walnut (about 2 tablespoons), 5 squares of toast, and salt and pepper. The trailing "12 eggs" sits oddly against five squares of toast and a single cup of sauce; a smaller number, perhaps five or six, would suit those quantities better, though the garbling makes any figure a guess. Treat the egg count as unreliable and scale to your toast.
- Twenty minutes is too longEggs boiled a full twenty minutes give you the grey-green sulphur ring around the yolk and a rubbery white. Since the yolks are sieved and the whites chopped, texture matters less than colour here, but 10 to 12 minutes covered off the heat gives a firm yolk that still sieves gold rather than khaki.
- Do not mix them — the hinge of the dishThe whole point is the contrast of white sauce, white-flecked, against bright yellow sieved yolk in alternating layers. Keep the two bowls strictly separate and sieve the yolks rather than mashing them; the fine crumb is what makes it, in the author's word, sightly.
- The cornstarch pasteRubbing cold butter and cornstarch together before dropping it into boiling milk is the period method, and the fat does help keep the grains apart, but it can still catch if you are not whisking steadily. Slaking the cornstarch in a spoonful of the cold milk first, then whisking it in and adding the butter at the end, gives the same sauce with less trouble. Cornstarch thickens quickly once the milk is at the boil.
- Season the sauce properlyA cup of milk thickened with a tablespoon of starch is bland by design; it needs more salt than seems reasonable, plus white pepper. Some cooks add a grating of nutmeg, which is orthodox for a white sauce of this period.
- "Stand in the oven for a minute or two"This is warming through, not baking; the book gives no temperature at all. A brief spell in a moderately hot oven, or a few seconds under a broiler if the toast is already hot, is all that is wanted. Longer and the sauce skins over and the toast goes soft.
- YieldFive squares of toast, so five servings as a light supper or two to three as a main plate. Assemble at the last moment; the toast begins to surrender the instant the sauce touches it.
Creamed hard-boiled eggs on toast, with the yolks pushed through a sieve for effect, ran through American cookery under several names — goldenrod eggs, eggs à la crème, and, in the South, Beauregard eggs, generally said to be named for the Louisiana-born Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard. The attribution is traditional rather than documented, and the dish has no obvious connection to the man. The white sauce thickened with cornstarch rather than flour is a mark of the period too — cornstarch was heavily promoted through the later nineteenth century as quicker and less liable to taste raw, and household writers took it up enthusiastically for exactly this kind of light supper dish.