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Creamed Cheese and Eggs
3 whites of hard-boiled eggs 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup milk Speck of cayenne 1/4 cup or 1 ounce grated cheese 4 slices toast 1/2 teaspoon salt Make a thin, white sauce with the flour, milk and seasonings. Add the cheese, and stir until melted. Chop the whites, and add them to the sauce. Pour the sauce over the toast.
A leftovers dish built around the hard-cooked whites left over when a recipe called for yolks alone. It comes together in about ten minutes and needs almost nothing from the pantry.
- The missing butterThe ingredient list gives flour, milk and seasonings but no fat, and a "thin white sauce" of the period was made with a roux. Use 1 tablespoon butter with the tablespoon of flour; without it you are making a milk-and-flour paste that will taste raw.
- Thin white sauce, definedOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk is the thinnest of the graded white sauces set out in books of this era. Cook the roux a minute before adding milk, then simmer two or three minutes so the flour loses its chalkiness.
- Cheese off the heatAdd the grated cheese once the sauce is thickened and the pan is off the burner. Held over direct heat it can separate and turn stringy.
- Which cheese"Grated cheese" in a book of this period most likely meant a firm American store cheese, roughly comparable to cheddar. An ounce is a small amount for a cup of sauce, so choose something with flavour; mild cheese disappears entirely.
- Chop the whites lateFold them in at the last moment and only warm them through. Hard-cooked whites toughen and squeak if they are held in hot sauce.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon plus cheese is on the salty side for one cup of sauce by current taste. Season the sauce lightly, add the cheese, then adjust.
- YieldFour slices of toast, so two modest servings as a supper dish or four as a first course. Toast just before serving; the sauce is thin and will soak in quickly.
Meatless Cookery is generally associated with American wartime kitchen literature, when meat conservation was urged through public campaigning but also through arguments from health and economy, and cheese, eggs and milk were promoted as the substitute proteins. The grouping of recipes under a heading like "Whites of Eggs" reflects a different pressure of the same period: eggs were expensive, custards and cakes routinely called for yolks alone, and a thrifty cook needed somewhere to put what was left. Creamed dishes on toast were the standard answer, since a white sauce will carry almost any odd remainder and stretch it across four slices of bread. The technique itself is older, often traced to the French sauce béchamel by way of the nineteenth-century domestic-science schools, which taught the graded thicknesses of white sauce.