Beauregard Eggs
Cover 3 eggs with boiling water, and keep the latter at simmering point for three-quarters of an hour, then cool and shell the eggs. Chop the whites quite fine. Make a sauce with 1 cupful of milk, 1 tablespoonful of flour mixed to a paste with a little cold milk and 1/3 of a teaspoonful of salt. Add the chopped whites and 1 scant teaspoonful of butter, and simmer for ten minutes. Toast and cut into triangles several slices of bread. Arrange on a hot dish, pour over the sauce and rub the yolks through a strainer, letting them cover the sauce. If desirable, garnish with a pinch of chopped parsley.
A creamed-egg-on-toast supper of the sort that filled out thrifty cookbooks. Almost everything here works as written; the egg timing does not.
- The three-quarter-hour eggForty-five minutes at a simmer will give you chalky, greenish yolks and rubbery whites. Ten to twelve minutes in barely simmering water, then straight into cold water, produces a firm yolk that still strains smoothly.
- The hinge: a smooth white sauceThe flour is slaked in cold milk and added to the rest, so the risk is lumps rather than scorching. Whisk the paste in off the heat, then bring it up gradually, and keep the ten-minute simmer gentle so the flour loses its raw taste without the milk catching.
- Butter proportionsOne scant teaspoon of butter to a cup of milk is a deliberately lean sauce. A tablespoon makes it noticeably richer if economy is not the object.
- Straining the yolksA fine mesh sieve and the back of a spoon works; the yolks should fall as a light powder over the sauce. Warm yolks press through more easily than fridge-cold ones.
- ToastUse bread with some structure and toast it dry and firm. Soft sandwich bread collapses under a cup of sauce within a minute or two.
- SeasoningA third of a teaspoon of salt for a cup of milk is modest by current taste. Pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are period-appropriate additions and do the sauce a favour.
- YieldThree eggs and a cup of sauce serve two generously or three lightly. Assemble at the table, not in advance.
This is the dish more often printed as eggs à la goldenrod, so called for the yellow crumb of sieved yolk scattered over white sauce; the Beauregard name is generally traced to the Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard, one of a great many Southern dishes to acquire a general's name in the decades after the Civil War, and the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance in a low-cost collection is easy to explain: three eggs, a cup of milk, a spoonful of flour and stale bread will feed two or three people, and the presentation — the whites bound into the sauce, the yolks pressed over the top — makes something that looks composed out of ingredients that cost almost nothing. Creamed eggs on toast under one name or another is documented in American print from around the turn of the century, and remained a standard Sunday-supper and invalid-tray dish well into the twentieth century.