Egg Sauce
Cut up six hard-boiled eggs, with salt and pepper to taste. Stir in a sufficient quantity of drawn butter, adding, just as you serve, minced onion, parsley, and thyme.--Mrs. S. T.
A short sauce of the old school, meant to be spooned over boiled fish. The whole thing turns on what "drawn butter" means, since the phrase no longer describes anything sold or taught.
- Drawn butter is not melted butterDrawn butter usually means more than melted butter -- in most nineteenth-century American cookbooks drawn butter is a thickened sauce, commonly something like 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 1 tablespoon flour, then whisked with about a cup of boiling water or fish broth and finished with more butter. (Some writers, especially British ones, used the phrase for plain melted or clarified butter.) A thickened sauce will coat the chopped eggs; plain melted butter tends to separate on the plate.
- How much sauce"A sufficient quantity" is left to the cook; for six chopped eggs something in the region of a cup and a half will bind the eggs loosely rather than suspend them, which means rather more than a single small batch of drawn butter. Add it gradually; the eggs absorb more than expected.
- The eggsHard-boiled here means fully set yolks. Chop rather than mash, and add them to warm sauce off the heat only a minute or two before serving so the whites stay firm and the yolks do not go chalky.
- Raw onion at the last momentThe minced onion goes in "just as you serve" deliberately -- it is not cooked. Use a mild onion or a shallot and mince it very fine, or it will dominate a delicate fish.
- HerbsFresh parsley and thyme are the likely intention, though the recipe does not say. Roughly a teaspoon of chopped parsley and half that of thyme leaves suits this quantity; if using dried thyme, use about a third as much and give it a moment in the warm sauce.
- Do not let it boilOnce the eggs are in, keep the pan below a simmer. Boiling curdles the flour-and-butter base and toughens the whites.
- Yield and useMakes enough for roughly six servings of boiled or baked fish -- cod, haddock, salmon -- and egg sauce was also served with boiled fowl.
Egg sauce was the standard American accompaniment to boiled salt fish and fresh cod through the whole of the nineteenth century, and drawn butter was its universal foundation; cookbooks of the period print a drawn butter recipe once and then refer back to it, which is why Mrs. S. T. can simply call for "a sufficient quantity." Housekeeping in Old Virginia, generally dated to the late 1870s, was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialed Virginia housekeepers, and the brevity is characteristic: these were notes passed between cooks who already knew the base sauces by heart. The finishing touch of raw onion, parsley and thyme is stirred in at the table.