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Eggs and Bacon with Cream Sauce (Slices bacon cup milk)
6 slices bacon. 1 cup milk. 6 hard-boiled eggs. 1 tablespoon butter. 1/2 teaspoon flour. Dash cayenne.
Make sauce with butter, milk and flour. Cook bacon crisp, cut eggs in half. Pour sauce over just before serving.
A supper dish of the plainest sort, given in the terse shorthand Mrs. Wilson used throughout her wartime-era books. The proportions need a second look before you start.
- The flour is almost certainly a misprintHalf a teaspoon of flour will not thicken a cup of milk into anything you could call a sauce. A standard white sauce of this weight takes 1 tablespoon butter to 1 tablespoon flour to 1 cup milk, which is likely what was meant. Take the printed figure as an error rather than a technique.
- Build the sauce properlyMelt the butter, stir in the flour, and let the paste cook a minute or two before the milk goes in, otherwise the sauce tastes of raw starch. Add the milk gradually and whisk until it coats a spoon.
- Season itThe only seasoning listed is cayenne. The sauce needs salt and pepper as well, though go carefully given the bacon; taste after the bacon is cooked and salt to suit.
- Bacon fat is the obvious improvementCook the bacon first and use a spoonful of the rendered fat in place of some or all of the butter. The recipe does not say to, but nothing else in the dish carries much flavor.
- Hard-boiled eggsCover the eggs with water, bring to a boil, then take the pan off the heat and let them stand 10 to 12 minutes. Chill in cold water; the shells slip off and the yolks stay yellow rather than turning that grey-green ring.
- Assemble at the last momentThe instruction to pour the sauce over just before serving is the hinge. Halved eggs sitting in hot sauce weep and the bacon goes limp within minutes. Warm the plates, lay out eggs and bacon, and sauce them as they go to the table.
- YieldSix eggs and six slices of bacon serve three as a light main course, or six as part of a larger breakfast. On toast it stretches further.
Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote for American households during and just after the First World War, when the Food Administration was urging families to stretch meat and use eggs and milk in its place. Hard-boiled eggs under a cream sauce belong to a long line of English and American nursery and supper dishes — eggs a la creme, eggs in bechamel, eggs on toast — that made a hot meal from what was already in the larder. The cayenne is the period's usual gesture toward interest in an otherwise white and mild plate.