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Beauregard Eggs (Pint of milk tablespoonful)
1/2 pint of milk 1 tablespoonful of corn starch Lump of butter, size of a 5 squares of toast walnut Salt and pepper to taste 5 eggs
What survives here is the ingredient column of a standard Creole egg dish: a cornstarch-thickened white sauce, hard-boiled eggs, and toast. The quantities are workable once the old measures are read correctly.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. It makes a fairly thin sauce with a tablespoon of cornstarch, which is what you want for spooning over toast rather than a stiff binding paste.
- Butter the size of a walnutRoughly 1 to 2 tablespoons; the equivalence varied from book to book. Nineteenth-century books commonly measured butter by comparison to nuts and eggs, when it was sold in irregular lumps rather than in marked sticks.
- Cornstarch, not flourCornstarch was widely available as a thickener by the later nineteenth century and gives a glossier, more translucent sauce than a flour roux. Slake it in a little cold milk first, then bring the sauce to a full boil for a minute or two; cornstarch tastes raw and chalky if it is only warmed through.
- How the dish is put togetherBeauregard eggs are conventionally assembled by hard-boiling the eggs, chopping the whites into the finished white sauce, pouring that over the toast, and pressing the yolks through a sieve on top as a yellow crumb. The ingredient list here matches that construction exactly, five eggs to five squares of toast.
- Boiling the eggsTen to twelve minutes in water just off the boil, then straight into cold water. The long hard boiling common in older cookery greens the yolk surface and makes it crumbly and sulphurous, which spoils the sieved topping.
- SeasoningA cornstarch sauce carries very little flavour of its own, so it needs more salt than you expect, plenty of white or black pepper, and benefits from a scrape of nutmeg. Season the sauce after it has thickened, when you can taste it properly.
- YieldFive servings as written, one square of toast each, and it is a light supper or breakfast dish rather than a main course. Toast the bread at the last moment; it softens quickly under the sauce.
The dish is generally traced to New Orleans and named for P. G. T. Beauregard, the Louisiana-born Confederate general who returned to the city after the war. Its appeal is entirely in the presentation: chopped white folded into a pale sauce, sieved yolk scattered gold over the top, so that a few eggs and a cup of milk are made to look like a composed dish. That economy is the point: eggs, milk and toast were reliable standbys of a kitchen making little go far.