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Fish Sauce (Six hard-boiled eggs chopped)
Six hard-boiled eggs, chopped and stirred into two cups of drawn butter. Let it simmer, then add one tablespoonful of pepper-sauce, two tablespoonfuls minced parsley, a little thyme and salt to the taste. Pour over the fish and slice a lemon over all.--Mrs. S. T.
An egg sauce of the old American school, meant to be ladled over a whole boiled or baked fish. The one thing to get right is the base: "drawn butter" in a 19th-century American book is not clarified butter.
- Drawn butterIn American cookbooks of this period drawn butter means a simple butter sauce: about a tablespoon of flour cooked in two tablespoons of butter, thinned with a cup of hot water or fish broth, then finished with more butter off the heat. Two cups of it needs roughly 2 tbsp flour, 4 tbsp butter and 2 cups liquid. Clarified butter alone will separate and swamp the eggs.
- Pepper-sauceMost likely the household bottle of small pods steeped in vinegar rather than a modern-style bottled hot sauce, so it would have contributed acidity as much as heat. A tablespoon of modern cayenne sauce is aggressive in two cups of sauce; start with a teaspoon and a splash of cider vinegar.
- Simmer brieflyOnce the chopped eggs are in, warm the sauce through and no more. A long simmer toughens the whites and makes the flour base break; two or three minutes is enough.
- Thyme"A little thyme" may well have meant fresh sprigs, though dried was also common. Use about a teaspoon of fresh leaves, or a scant quarter-teaspoon dried, and let it steep in the butter sauce before the eggs go in so it softens.
- Six eggsThat is a generous quantity of egg for two cups of sauce, giving something closer to a dressing than a pourable sauce. Four eggs produces a version that still coats the fish without burying it.
- YieldRoughly three to three and a half cups, enough for a whole fish of four to five pounds serving six to eight. It does not reheat well; make it while the fish rests.
- The lemonSlicing lemon over the finished dish is doing real work here, since the sauce has no other acid but the pepper vinegar. Use thin rounds over the fish and pass extra wedges.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialed Virginia housewives, is full of these short signed receipts, and "Mrs. S. T." is typical of the book's habit of crediting a neighbor rather than a printed source. Egg sauce over boiled fish was standard Anglo-American practice in the 19th century, descended from the English butter sauces that dressed everything from turbot to salt cod, and versions of it are common in American household manuals of the era. The tablespoon of pepper-sauce gives this version a Southern cast: bottled pepper vinegar was a fixture of the Virginia table, and it turns up here doing the seasoning work that a French kitchen might have given to mustard or capers.