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Eggs a La Goldenrod
6 hard-cooked eggs 2 cups thin white sauce 8 slices toast Salt and pepper Paprika Separate the yolks from the whites of the eggs and chop the whites very fine. Add to the white sauce with salt, pepper, paprika. Arrange six slices of toast on a platter and pour over them the white sauce mixture. Press the egg-yolks through a sieve and scatter over the top. Cut the two extra slices of toast into small triangles, or points, arrange on the platter and garnish with parsley.
A creamed-egg supper dish built on a thin white sauce; almost everything depends on the sauce and on how finely the yolks are sieved.
- Thin white sauceIn this period "thin" means roughly 1 tablespoon each butter and flour per cup of milk, half the fat and flour of a medium sauce. For 2 cups, melt 2 tablespoons butter, stir in 2 tablespoons flour, cook a minute without browning, then whisk in 2 cups milk and simmer until it just coats a spoon.
- Season the sauce properlyMilk-based sauce takes more salt than cooks expect. Season it before the whites go in, then taste again; a scrape of nutmeg is period-appropriate and helps.
- The sieved yolksPress the yolks through a fine sieve rather than grating or chopping. That fluffy, separate texture is the whole point of the name, and it collapses if the yolks are mashed or damp.
- Hard-cooked eggsCover the eggs with water, bring to a boil, take off the heat and let stand 10-12 minutes, then cool in cold water. Long boiling gives the grey-green ring and a rubbery white that will not chop cleanly.
- Toast pointsThe extra two slices cut into triangles are decoration around the rim of the platter, not extra servings. Toast everything at the last minute; the sauce softens it fast.
- Yield and timingServes three to four as a light supper or breakfast, one to two topped slices each. Assemble immediately before carrying it to the table.
- Held sauceIf the sauce sits, it will skin over and thicken. Keep it covered over the lowest heat and loosen with a little hot milk before pouring.
The name is generally taken to come from the look of the finished platter: pale sauce strewn with bright sieved yolk, like the flowering heads of goldenrod. Recipes of this shape spread through American cooking schools and domestic-science teaching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where a well-made white sauce was taught as a foundation skill and then varied with eggs, fish, chipped beef or vegetables on toast. It belongs to the same practical tradition as creamed chipped beef: cheap protein, milk, flour and yesterday's bread, plated to look deliberate. Dishes of this kind were commonly suggested for Lenten meals, invalid trays and light suppers.