Home › Chafing Dish Delicacies › Creamed Eggs
Creamed Eggs
Melt two tablespoons butter; add two tablespoon flour, one fourth teaspoon salt, few grains cayenne, one cup cream. Cook until thick, add two egg yolks and six hardcooked eggs, cut in pieces, and serve hot on toast.
A chafing-dish standby: a thick cream sauce carrying chopped hard-cooked eggs, enriched at the last moment with raw yolks. The hinge is the yolks.
- The yolks are the whole trickStir the two raw yolks in off the direct heat, or with a little hot sauce beaten into them first, then return the pan briefly to low heat. If the sauce boils after the yolks go in, it will break into curds and no amount of whisking brings it back.
- ProportionsTwo tablespoons each butter and flour to one cup liquid is a thick white sauce, deliberately so — it has to coat six eggs' worth of pieces and still sit on toast. Cook the roux a minute before adding the cream so it does not taste of raw flour.
- Cream"Cream" in a book of this period usually means something around 18–20 percent fat, closer to today's light cream or half-and-half than to heavy whipping cream. Whole milk works and gives a lighter sauce; heavy cream will make it very rich and may need thinning.
- Hard-cooked eggsCover the eggs with water, bring just to a boil, cover and stand off the heat about 12 minutes, then cool in cold water. A hard boil gives the rubbery white and green-rimmed yolk that this sauce cannot hide.
- Cayenne"Few grains" means a pinch — enough to lift the dairy, not enough to read as heat. Start with about 1/16 teaspoon.
- Chafing dish practicalitiesThe recipe itself says nothing about equipment, but if you are cooking it in a chafing dish, make the sauce over the direct flame and switch to the water pan before the yolks go in; the hot-water bath keeps the mixture below curdling point while it waits at table.
- YieldServes three or four as a light supper or breakfast dish, over buttered toast cut in triangles. It thickens as it stands, so hold back a little cream to loosen it.
Creamed eggs belong to the brief American vogue for the chafing dish, which ran from the 1890s through the 1910s and put a spirit lamp and a lidded pan in the hands of people who wanted to cook at the table rather than in the kitchen. The repertoire was narrow by design: welsh rarebit, lobster Newburg, creamed oysters, curries, and eggs in every form that a sauce could carry, all of them dishes that could be finished in one pan in front of guests, often after the theatre or at a late supper when the servants had gone. Lowney's, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, issued its cookbook as advertising for its cocoa and baking chocolate but filled it out with a full household repertoire, chafing-dish chapter included. The technique here — a béchamel finished with raw yolks — is the standard nineteenth-century liaison, the same move that turns a velouté into a sauce allemande.