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Yellow Egg Sauce
To White Sauce add few drops of onion juice and the yolks of three eggs; salt and pepper if necessary.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have the book's White Sauce at hand. The whole dish turns on how the yolks go in.
- The hinge: temper, and never boilWhisk a ladle of the hot white sauce into the beaten yolks, then return the mixture to the pan off the direct heat. Yolks in a flour-thickened sauce tolerate more heat than a plain custard, but pushed too far -- much beyond about 180F -- they will scramble and grain the sauce.
- Hold it hot enough to be safeEgg yolks stirred into a hot sauce should reach 160F for safety. A probe thermometer is the surest way to hit that without passing into curdling territory.
- What the White Sauce isThe recipe assumes the book's own White Sauce, not given here. A typical white sauce of the period ran to roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked without colour, with a cup of milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Three yolks would be a generous enrichment for that quantity.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or crush it in a garlic press. A few drops means a few drops; it is there for background savour, not onion flavour.
- ConsistencyThe yolks thicken as they set, so start with a white sauce slightly looser than you want the finished sauce to be. Thin with warm milk if it tightens too far.
- Yield and servingAssuming a cup of white sauce as the base, about a cup and a quarter, enough for four. A sauce of this kind would have gone with boiled or steamed fish, poached chicken, asparagus or cauliflower, and it does not reheat well once the yolks have set.
- Salt and pepper "if necessary"The instruction assumes the base sauce is already seasoned. Taste after the yolks go in, since the added fat mutes salt noticeably. White pepper keeps the colour clean.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that, like Baker's and Fleischmann's, put out a general cookbook as advertising. Its sauce chapter follows the pattern of the Boston Cooking School tradition then dominant in New England: one master white sauce, followed by a column of short derivations built by addition rather than by starting over. Enriching a white sauce with yolks is the same move that turns a velouté into a sauce allemande in the French repertoire, and the yellow colour it produces was valued in a period when a dish's appearance on the table was discussed as seriously as its flavour. The onion juice is characteristic of the era too, when cooks wanted the savour of onion without the texture or the visible flecks.}