Escalloped Eggs
6 hard cooked eggs 1/3 cup ripe olives 2 cups bread crumbs 1 1/2 cups milk 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon salt Cook the eggs by putting them on in cold water. When the boiling point is reached, cover, and let simmer for about twenty minutes. Make a white sauce by rubbing together the flour and butter and one-half teaspoon salt. Add a little of the warm milk slowly; then add the remainder. Cook the sauce in a double boiler fifteen to twenty minutes. Cut sufficient ripe olives from the stones to make one-third cup.
Butter a baking dish, place in the bottom one-fourth of the bread crumbs; then over the crumbs slice thinly three of the hard cooked eggs. Add half of the chopped olives and half of the white sauce. Then spread another fourth of the bread crumbs, adding the remainder of the egg, the olives and the white sauce. Finish by spreading the remaining half of the buttered crumbs on top. Bake twenty minutes in a moderate oven or until nicely browned.
A layered crumb-and-sauce gratin of the sort American cookbooks called "escalloped" — the technique matters more than the ingredients, and two of the original's timings are worth ignoring.
- Moderate ovenSet it to 350F. Twenty minutes is enough to heat the dish through and brown the top, since everything going in is already cooked.
- The eggs are overcooked as writtenTwenty minutes of simmering gives you a grey-green ring around the yolk and a rubbery white. Bring the water to a boil, cover, take the pan off the heat entirely, and leave the eggs 10 to 12 minutes, then cool them in cold water so they peel and slice cleanly.
- White sauce, fasterTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to 1 1/2 cups milk is a thin sauce, correctly so — it needs to soak the crumbs rather than sit on them. The double boiler and its 15 to 20 minutes were insurance against scorching on a coal range; in a heavy saucepan over medium-low heat, whisking, it thickens and loses its raw-flour taste in about 5 minutes.
- Buttered crumbsThe recipe calls for "buttered crumbs" on top but allots all the butter to the sauce. Melt an extra 2 to 3 tablespoons and toss it through the 2 cups of crumbs before you begin layering; unbuttered crumbs will not brown.
- CrumbsDry crumbs, not fresh — fresh ones dissolve into the sauce. Coarse crumbs from stale bread, or panko, hold their texture.
- Ripe olivesThese are canned black olives, the mild California kind. Cured Kalamatas or oil-cured olives will overwhelm the dish; if that is all you have, use half the quantity.
- Salt and seasoningOf the teaspoon of salt, half goes into the sauce; use the rest sparingly between the layers, remembering that the olives are already salty. A grind of pepper, a scrape of nutmeg or a little dry mustard in the sauce keeps it from tasting flat.
- YieldServes four as a light main course in a 1 1/2-quart dish, or six alongside something else. Let it stand five minutes before serving so the sauce sets enough to spoon out in layers.
"Escalloped" is simply an older spelling of scalloped, and in American cookery of this period it meant neither shellfish nor shells but a specific method: a buttered dish, alternating layers of crumbs and a cream sauce with something folded in, baked only long enough to brown. Almost anything could be escalloped — oysters, potatoes, tomatoes, salmon — and the method suited a meat-sparing kitchen because it turned inexpensive protein into something that could be carried to the table as a main dish. The ripe olives are the period detail: California canneries had by the early twentieth century made mild lye-cured black olives a widely available pantry item, and American cookbooks of the period scattered them through casseroles, sandwich fillings and salads with an enthusiasm that later faded.