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Egg Sauce
I yolk hard cooked egg 2 raw egg yolks I oz. (I heaping tablespoonful) butter 1 tablespoonful lemon juice I oz. (1 heaping tablespoon- 1 teaspoonful chopped ful) flour parsley 1/2 pint (I cup) milk Salt, pepper, and paprika 1 gill (1/2 cup) stock Melt the butter in a fireproof dish, stir in the flour, milk, stock, parsley, seasonings, and the hard cooked yolk of egg rubbed through a sieve.
Stir till it boils for three minutes, then remove from the fire and stir in the raw yolks of eggs and the lemon juice.
A velouté-style sauce thickened twice: once with a butter-and-flour roux, then again with raw yolks stirred in off the heat. The second thickening is where it succeeds or fails.
- The hinge: add the yolks off the heatOnce the raw yolks go in, the sauce must not return to a boil or it will scramble into grains. Pull the pan well away from the burner, let it stop bubbling for a few seconds, then beat the yolks in vigorously; the residual heat of a hot cup and a half of sauce is generally enough to thicken them, though it will not necessarily bring them to a safe temperature.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. The recipe usefully gives its own conversions, which was not universal in books of this date.
- Ounces are weights, not volumesOne ounce of butter is two tablespoons in modern terms, and one ounce of flour is a scant quarter cup — noticeably more than a level tablespoon, heaping or not. Weigh both if you can.
- "Fireproof dish"A vessel that can go directly over the flame as well as in the oven. Any heavy saucepan does the job.
- StockMatch it to what the sauce will dress — fish stock for poached fish, chicken for boiled fowl. Modern boxed stock is saltier than the homemade broth assumed here, so hold back the salt until the end.
- Boil for three minutesThis is the roux-cooking stage and it matters: three minutes of actual simmering removes the raw-flour taste and lets the starch swell fully. Stir constantly, since milk-and-flour sauces catch quickly on a thin pan.
- The sieved hard-cooked yolkPush it through a fine strainer rather than mashing it, or it stays lumpy and floats. It is there for colour and richness, not thickening.
- YieldAbout a cup and a half — enough for four to six servings of poached fish, boiled chicken, or asparagus. Made ahead, it will need gentle rewarming below a simmer and may want a spoonful of milk to loosen.
- If raw egg is a concernThe yolks here are cooked only by carryover heat. Anyone cooking for the very young, the elderly, or the immune-compromised should use pasteurized eggs.
Egg sauce in English and American cookery covered two quite different things: a plain white sauce with chopped hard-boiled egg stirred through it, long served with salt cod and boiled fish, and this more ambitious version, which borrows the French technique of finishing a sauce with a liaison of raw yolks. The lemon juice and the off-heat yolks put it squarely between a velout presence in a casserole-cookery book reflects what those books were selling: fireproof earthenware and glass were becoming available to middle-class kitchens around this period, and publishers filled such volumes with a full complement of standard sauces, stovetop work included.