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Egg Sauce (for Salt Fish)
INGREDIENTS for sauce for 4 lbs. of fish.-4 eggs, pint of melted butter, when liked, a very little lemon-juice. AVERAGE COST, 6d.
Boil the eggs until quite hard, which will be in about 20 minutes, and put them into cold water for 1/2 hour. Strip off the shells, chop the eggs into small pieces, not, however, too fine. Make the melted butter very smooth, and when boiling, stir in the eggs, and serve very hot. Lemon-juice may be added at pleasure.
TIME.-20 minutes to boil the eggs.
Note. When a thicker sauce is required, use one or two more eggs to the same quantity of melted butter.
Egg Soup. INGREDIENTS for soup for 8 persons. A tablespoonful of flour, 4 eggs, 2 small blades of finely-pounded mace, 2 quarts of stock. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 8d.
Beat up the flour smoothly in a teaspoonful of cold stock, and put in the eggs; throw them into boiling stock, stirring all the time. Simmer for 1/4 of an hour. Season and serve with a French roll in the tureen, or fried sippets of bread.
TIME. an hour.
SEASONABLE all the year.
Two recipes have run together on this page: the egg sauce proper, and the opening of an egg soup. Both hinge on Victorian conventions that no longer read straight.
- "Melted butter" is not melted butterIn Beeton this is a standing English sauce: butter thickened with a little flour and loosened with water or milk to pouring consistency, not butter melted in a pan. Take it as a plain white sauce and the recipe makes sense; take it literally and you get greasy chopped egg.
- A pint here is an imperial pint20 fl oz, or about 2 1/2 US cups. That is a generous quantity of sauce, sized to the 4 lb of fish the ingredient line specifies.
- Twenty minutes is too longHard-boiled eggs need 10 to 12 minutes from boiling for a set yolk. Twenty gives the grey-green sulphide ring and a chalky yolk, which shows in a pale sauce. The cold-water plunge in the original is sound practice and worth keeping.
- Chop coarsely, and add off the heatThe instruction not to chop too fine is the point of the sauce: it should read as egg in sauce, not as a purée. Stir the egg into the hot sauce and serve immediately rather than holding it, or the whites toughen and the yolk clouds the base.
- The salt fish it was made forSalt cod and salt ling need long soaking, typically 24 to 48 hours with several changes of water, before they are poached. The sauce is unsalted for that reason; season it only after tasting alongside the fish.
- YieldEnough for 4 lb of cooked fish, which is six to eight servings. Halve the whole thing for a domestic-sized piece.
- The egg soup fragmentIts two conflicting times are both in the original: a quarter of an hour of simmering in the method, an hour in the time line. Neither matters much, since eggs beaten into boiling stock set almost at once. Whisk hard as they go in or you get ribbons rather than a smooth thickening, and note that 2 quarts of stock for 8 is a thin, restorative broth rather than a substantial soup. "Sippets" are small triangles or cubes of fried bread.
Egg sauce with salt fish is one of the fixed pairings of the English religious calendar: salt cod is often said to have been a common Good Friday and Lenten dish in Britain, and Beeton's readers may well have recognised the sauce without being told what it was for. The economy of the pairing is the whole story of preserved fish in a pre-refrigeration kitchen. Salted, dried cod travelled from the Newfoundland and Norwegian fisheries and kept for months, but it emerged from soaking bland and fibrous, so it was commonly served under something rich, such as this sauce or parsley sauce. The costings, sixpence for the sauce and one shilling eightpence for two quarts of soup, are the kind of detail that made Beeton's book a household-management manual as much as a cookery book: the mistress could check the cook's spending against the page.