Home › Vegetables › Goldenrod Eggs
Goldenrod Eggs
1 teaspoon salt few grains cayenne teaspoon pepper Remove shell from eggs; chop whites finely; add to white sauce. Press yolks through sieve and add seasonings. Pour white sauce over toast arranged on a platter, and garnish with yolks of eggs and parsley.
This dish may be very attractively arranged by placing spoonfuls of finely chopped ham around the toast.
The text as printed is a fragment: the tail of an ingredient list survives, but the number of eggs and the white sauce itself have dropped out. What follows fills the gaps in the way the period intended.
- What the missing list heldThe fragment preserves only the seasonings, so the quantities have to be guessed. A dish of this kind in a book of this period would take something like six hard-cooked eggs and about two cups of white sauce, served over six slices of toast; treat those figures as a reconstruction, not as the book's own.
- Medium white sauceWhite sauce -- Two tablespoons butter, two tablespoons flour and two cups milk gives a thin sauce by the period's own reckoning; the cooking-school books' medium sauce doubles the butter and flour against the milk. Cook until it coats a spoon, and keep it on the thicker side so the toast does not soak through.
- Hard-cooked eggsCover the eggs with cold water, bring just to a boil, then hold off the heat, covered, for about twelve minutes. Prolonged hard boiling is what produces the grey-green ring and a rubbery white.
- Chop the whites, sieve the yolksThis is the hinge of the dish. The whites go into the sauce; only the yolks are pressed through a sieve, and they fall best as a light powder when cool and dry. Mashing them with a fork gives lumps and the golden-rod effect disappears.
- Where the seasonings goThe line "press yolks through sieve and add seasonings" can be read either way; the salt, cayenne and pepper may be meant for the yolks or for the sauce. Season the sauce to taste in any case, since the yolk garnish is spread thin over the top.
- Assemble at the last minuteToast, sauce and yolk should meet just before serving; held any length of time, the toast softens and the sieved yolk mats down.
- The ham variationThe recipe offers spoonfuls of finely chopped ham arranged around the toast. Use a well-cured ham; the sauce is mild.
- YieldNo yield is given in the surviving text. On the six-egg reconstruction above it would serve about six as a light supper, or three as a main dish.
Goldenrod eggs take their name from the plant: the sieved yolk scattered over pale sauce was thought to look like the flower's yellow plume, and the dish appears under that name across American cookbooks and domestic-science manuals, sometimes as "eggs a la goldenrod." It belongs to the school of cooking built on white sauce that Boston's cooking-school teachers made standard, in which one mastered a roux and then rang changes on it with eggs, fish, chicken or vegetables. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored books of the period it printed a full general cookery course alongside the chocolate recipes that justified the volume.