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Egg Sauce (Make a cream sauce add two)
Make a cream sauce; add two hard-boiled eggs, the whites finely chopped and the yolks pressed through a sieve.
A one-line recipe that assumes you already know the base. Everything depends on the cream sauce underneath it and on treating the eggs as two separate textures rather than one chopped mass.
- What "cream sauce" meant hereMost likely a medium white sauce of the standard period type: roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk or thin cream, cooked until the flour loses its raw taste and seasoned with salt and a little white pepper. In many books of the period the liquid was milk rather than cream, despite the name.
- Cook the roux before the milk goes inTwo or three minutes of butter and flour bubbling together over low heat is the difference between a sauce that tastes of sauce and one that tastes of paste. Do not let it colour; this sauce should stay white.
- Whites and yolks kept separate on purposeChopped whites give small firm flecks, sieved yolk dissolves into a fine golden dust that thickens and enriches the sauce slightly. Chopping both together loses the effect entirely, which is why the instruction bothers to distinguish them.
- Hard-boiled without the grey ringBring the eggs to a boil, cover, take off the heat and leave 10-12 minutes, then cool in cold water. Overcooked yolks go grey-green at the edge and turn dry and chalky.
- Add the eggs off the heatFold them in at the end and warm gently. Boiling after the eggs go in toughens the whites.
- ConsistencyThe yolks thicken the sauce a little. If it stiffens on standing, loosen it with a spoonful of hot milk rather than reheating hard.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/4 cups, enough for four servings. This is the standard sauce for poached or boiled fish, salt cod, and boiled fowl; a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of chopped parsley is a common period addition.
Egg sauce belongs to the large family of English and American white sauces built on butter, flour and milk, and it survived in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American kitchens chiefly as the accompaniment to boiled or poached fish, salt cod in particular. The pairing is old and practical: a bland, thickened sauce carried fat and richness to lean, salt-soaked fish at a time when Friday and Lenten fish dinners were a familiar habit in at least some households. The sauce chapter simply lists the variations built on a cream sauce, which the recipe treats as assumed knowledge.