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Creamed Egg
Do not boil egg; just simmer it for 20 minutes. Blend 2 tablespoons margarine and 2 tablespoons flour in small pan over flame; gradually add 1 cup milk, stirring constantly while cooking. Season the sauce, slice the hard cooked egg into it, and pour over slice toast. For variety, the egg white may be cut into the sauce, and the yolk sieved over it, for Goldenrod Eggs.
A basic medium white sauce with hard-cooked egg, the kind of nursery supper that appears in nearly every mid-century household book. The only instruction worth second-guessing is the cooking time for the egg.
- Egg timingTwenty minutes at a simmer will give you a chalky yolk with a green-grey ring where sulphur has met iron. Twelve minutes off the boil, then straight into cold water, produces a fully set yolk that still slices cleanly.
- Simmer, not boilThe recipe is right about this. A rolling boil knocks the shells together and toughens the white; water barely trembling gives a more tender egg.
- Sauce proportionsTwo tablespoons each fat and flour to one cup milk is a medium white sauce, thick enough to coat toast without running off. Cook the roux a minute before adding milk or the sauce tastes of raw flour.
- MargarineMargarine here likely reflects household economy as much as preference. Butter can be substituted directly and tastes better.
- Seasoning"Season the sauce" is left to the cook; salt and pepper are the obvious reading. For a children's plate keep the salt modest; a scrape of nutmeg or a little dry mustard suits the milk and egg well.
- QuantityAs written this feeds one child generously or two small ones. One cup of sauce is enough for two eggs if you want to stretch it, though the sauce will taste blander in proportion.
- Goldenrod variantPress the yolk through a fine sieve while it is still slightly warm and it will fall in soft crumbs. Cold yolk crumbles into pellets instead.
- ToastToast it dry and firm, and assemble at the last moment; sauce soaks into crisp toast quickly.
Creamed eggs on toast belongs to the family of milk-sauce dishes that carried American and British households through the first half of the twentieth century: cheap, soft, quickly assembled from staples, and endlessly renamed depending on what went into the sauce. The period's feeding advice favoured bland, soft, milk-based foods for the young, and eggs were promoted hard as a protein source. The Goldenrod variation, named for the sprays of yellow crumbs across the white sauce, was a standard trick for making the same ingredients look like a different dish, and appears in earlier cooking-school and home-economics writing; it is often said to have entered general use through domestic science classes, where a single technique was routinely taught in two presentations. The use of margarine rather than butter suggests a twentieth-century, economy-minded text.