Golden-Rod Eggs
2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon flour Chopped parsley Salt, pepper 1 1/2 cups of milk 4 hard boiled eggs Make a sauce of the butter, flour, parsley, milk and seasoning. Chop the eggs and add them to the sauce. When well blended pour over buttered toast and serve hot.
A creamed-egg dish on toast, of the kind that carried breakfast and supper in the years when eggs stood in for meat. The original leaves several quantities to the cook's judgement.
- The sauce is deliberately thinOne tablespoon of flour to 1 1/2 cups milk gives a pouring sauce barely thicker than cream, which is correct here — it has to soak the toast without turning to paste. If you want it to sit on the toast rather than run off it, use 2 tablespoons of flour with the 2 tablespoons of butter the recipe already calls for.
- Cook the roux before the milk goes inLet the butter and flour bubble together a minute or two over low heat so the raw-flour taste goes, then add the milk gradually and whisk. Nothing in the wording prevents lumps, so the technique is on you.
- Parsley goes in at the endThe recipe lists it with the sauce ingredients, but chopped parsley boiled in a white sauce turns drab. Stir in a tablespoon or two off the heat.
- Hard-boiled eggsTwelve minutes in barely simmering water, then straight into cold water, gives a set yolk without the grey-green ring and the sulphur smell that comes of long boiling.
- The name suggests a different assemblyClassic "golden-rod" versions chop only the whites into the sauce and press the yolks through a sieve over the top, so the yellow crumbs scatter like goldenrod flowers. This version chops everything together, which tastes the same but loses the point of the title.
- SeasoningWith only butter, flour, milk and egg for flavour, this needs more salt than you expect, plus white pepper and a grating of nutmeg if you like. Taste the sauce before the eggs go in.
- YieldServes 2 generously or 4 lightly, on two slices of toast each. Make the toast last and dry — soft bread collapses under the sauce.
"Golden-rod eggs" appears in American cookbooks and domestic-science manuals from around the turn of the twentieth century, usually in the breakfast or supper chapters, and the name is generally traced to the look of sieved yolk sprinkled over a pale sauce rather than to any ingredient. Creamed eggs on toast belonged to a family of cheap, quickly assembled dishes — chipped beef, creamed codfish, welsh rarebit — that turned a white sauce and one substantial ingredient into a meal. Its appeal to cooks avoiding meat is straightforward: eggs and milk were the standard protein stand-ins for households observing Lent, following a doctor's or reformer's advice against flesh, or keeping the voluntary meatless days urged on American cooks during the First World War. The dish survives in institutional cooking well past the period.