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Egg Sauce
1 chopped hard-cooked egg 1 cup medium white sauce Combine the two ingredients.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already know what a medium white sauce is. That assumption is the whole recipe, so start there.
- Medium white sauceIn books of this era, medium means 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Thin is 1 tablespoon each, thick is 3 to 4.
- Cook the roux outLet the butter and flour bubble a full minute or two before the milk goes in, or the sauce tastes of raw starch. That flavor is what makes a plain egg sauce taste like paste.
- Season itThe original gives no salt or pepper, presumably because the book's white sauce recipe carries them. Salt to taste, white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg or a squeeze of lemon if the sauce is going onto fish.
- The eggChop, do not mash. Fold it in off the heat at the last moment so the pieces stay distinct; held over heat the yolk clouds the sauce and turns it grainy.
- Hard-cooked without the green ringCover eggs with cold water, bring just to a boil, cover and stand off the heat 12 to 15 minutes, then chill in cold water. Hard boiling for a quarter hour, as older books direct, gives the sulfurous gray-green layer around the yolk.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 cup, enough for four servings of poached or baked fish. Traditionally spooned over salt cod, salmon, or halibut, and it thickens as it cools, so thin with a spoonful of milk if it stands.
Egg sauce is the plainest branch of a family of white sauces that English and American kitchens built out of a butter-and-flour base, and it belongs to the boiled-fish tradition: salt cod, fresh salmon, and haddock were all sent to table under it. Its persistence in New England is usually tied to the salt cod trade, where a bland, rich sauce balanced a heavily salted fish. The New Delineator Recipes, published by the Butterick company for a magazine readership, treats it much as the period's home economics writers did, as one variation on a memorized white sauce formula in thin, medium, and thick proportions. That formula was the point of such books: learn one ratio, and a dozen sauces follow from it with a single addition each.