Beauregard Eggs
1 cup cream sauce 6 slices buttered toast Put the eggs in the water over the fire and let them "simmer" for twenty minutes. Prepare the toast and set it in the oven to keep hot. Remove the eggs from their shells; cut them in halves lengthwise or chop them fine and put them over the toast. Make a cream sauce; pour over all; garnish with parsley and serve. 6 eggs 4 sardines
A loose-leaf page with its ingredient list split across the top and bottom, and one ingredient that never reappears in the method. The dish is hard-cooked eggs on toast under a white sauce.
- The full ingredient listSix eggs, four sardines, one cup cream sauce, six slices buttered toast. The sardines are listed but never mentioned again — bone and mash them into the sauce, or lay them on the toast under the eggs.
- Twenty minutes is too longEggs simmered a full twenty minutes come out with rubbery whites and a grey-green ring around the yolk from iron sulphide. Bring them to a boil, cover, take the pan off the heat and leave them 10 to 12 minutes, then cool in cold water.
- The version worth makingClassic Beauregard eggs separate the cooked whites from the yolks: chop the whites into the cream sauce, spoon that over the toast, then push the yolks through a sieve on top so they fall as fine gold crumbs. The recipe as printed lets you halve or chop the whole egg, but the sieved-yolk finish is what gives the dish its look.
- Cream sauceIn books of this period this usually means a plain milk-based white sauce rather than one made with cream, though some do call for cream. A workable version: one tablespoon butter, one tablespoon flour, one cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt and pepper.
- Keeping the toastToast held in the oven dries out rather than staying hot. A 200F oven for a few minutes is enough, and it is better to time the toast to the sauce than to hold it.
- SardinesUse oil-packed sardines, drained. Tinned sardines vary a good deal in saltiness; taste before salting the sauce.
- YieldSix slices, so six servings as a supper or breakfast dish, or three as a main course with something green alongside.
Beauregard eggs appear across American cookbooks from the late nineteenth century into the mid twentieth, and the name is generally traced to P. G. T. Beauregard, the Louisiana-born Confederate general, one of many military names in that period, alongside various eggs and salads honoring other figures. What distinguishes the dish from ordinary creamed eggs on toast is the division of the egg: whites bound in sauce, yolks sieved over the top for color. That it turns up here at all says something about the era's appetite for cheap protein dressed up with a white sauce and a name. The sardines are a frugal touch, perhaps a tinned fish standing in for anchovy to give the sauce savor.