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Eggs and Bacon with Cream Sauce (French Style slices of bacon)
French Style. 6 slices of bacon. 1 cup milk. 6 hard-boiled eggs. 1 tablespoon butter. 1/2 teaspoon flour. Dash of cayenne.
Make sauce with butter milk and flour. Cook bacon crisp, cut eggs in half, pour sauce over just before serving.
A terse formula in the style of Mrs. Wilson's shorthand entries: a small cream sauce, crisp bacon and halved hard-boiled eggs, assembled at the last moment. Two of the quantities need attention before you start.
- The flour is almost certainly a misprintThe flour looks too low -- Half a teaspoon of flour will not thicken a cup of milk into anything you can pour over eggs. A standard thin white sauce is 1 tablespoon each butter and flour per cup of milk; a sauce that coats is usually given as 2 tablespoons of each. Whether the printed 1/2 teaspoon is a compositor's error or simply a very thin sauce cannot be settled from the page, but it will not behave as the instruction implies.
- Make the sauce properlyMelt the butter, stir in the flour and cook it a minute or two without colouring, then add the milk gradually off the heat before returning it to a simmer. Two or three minutes of gentle bubbling removes the raw-flour taste.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives only cayenne. Salt the sauce, and remember the bacon brings its own; taste before you add more. A scrape of nutmeg is period-appropriate and suits the eggs.
- Hard-boiled eggsTwelve minutes in barely simmering water, then straight into cold water, gives set yolks without the grey ring and the sulphur smell that longer boiling produces. Peel while still warm.
- BaconBacon of the period was often more heavily cured, and cut thicker, than much of what is sold pre-sliced now. Six slices laid on a rack in a 400F oven for 15-18 minutes crisp evenly with no attention; drain on paper.
- Assemble at the tableThe instruction to pour the sauce over "just before serving" is the whole point of the dish. Held together, the bacon softens and the egg whites weep. Warm the plates, arrange the halved eggs cut side up, sauce them, and lay the bacon over.
- YieldSix eggs and six slices of bacon serve three as a light lunch or supper, or six at breakfast alongside toast. Buttered toast points or a split baked potato catch the sauce.
Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book (Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1920), by Mary A. Wilson, belongs to a body of work shaped by the food-conservation campaigns of the First World War. That background shows here: half a dozen eggs and six slices of bacon are stretched into a served dish by a cup of milk and a spoon of butter, which is exactly the arithmetic of wartime household economy carried on into peacetime. The "French style" label is probably doing the work that such labels usually did in American cookbooks of the period, signalling nothing more precise than the presence of a flour-thickened cream sauce; hard-boiled eggs masked in a white sauce are said to have been sold under a whole family of names, oeufs a la creme and eggs a la bechamel among them, and the French tag arguably lent a plain plateful a little standing.