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Savory Eggs
6 hot hard-cooked eggs Salt and pepper 1/4 cup hot cream 1 cup hot thin white sauce Chopped parsley Anchovy paste 6 slices hot buttered toast Cut the eggs in two lengthwise and remove the yolks. Mash the yolks, add seasonings, cream, parsley, anchovy or any desired relish, and refill the whites. Place on slices of toast and pour the white sauce over them.
A stuffed-egg supper dish from the era when a white sauce turned almost anything into a hot meal. Everything must be hot at once, so the sauce and toast want to be ready before the eggs are filled.
- Thin white sauceIn this period "thin" means 1 tablespoon each butter and flour per cup of milk, half the fat and flour of a medium sauce. It should coat a spoon barely and pour freely; a medium sauce here will sit on the eggs like paste.
- Hot hard-cooked eggsThe eggs are meant to be cooked and filled without cooling. Bring them just to a boil, cover, hold off the heat about 12 minutes, then shell under warm running water so the whites stay warm and pliable.
- Anchovy paste is undosedThe original gives no quantity. Start with 1/2 teaspoon for six yolks, taste, and go no higher than 1 1/2 teaspoons — anchovy plus the salt already added will overshoot quickly.
- Cream1/4 cup of hot cream into six yolks gives a soft, almost spoonable filling rather than a piped one. Add it gradually; older eggs and larger yolks absorb differently.
- Seasoning orderSeason the yolks before the anchovy or other relish, then correct at the end. The recipe gives no seasoning instruction for the sauce itself, so taste it and add salt and pepper if it needs them.
- Keeping it hotWarm the plates and butter the toast last. Assembled, the dish loses heat fast, and cold toast under hot sauce goes limp.
- YieldSix servings as written — two halves on one slice of toast each. As a light lunch with a salad that is right; as a main course, count on two slices per person and double everything.
Stuffed hard-cooked eggs napped in white sauce and set on toast belong to the large family of "made dishes" common in American cookbooks between the 1890s and the 1930s, when white sauce was a standard part of a cook's repertoire. Anchovy paste, sold in small tubes and jars and shelf-stable, was a familiar pantry relish of the period, often used as a general savory sharpener as much as for a distinctly fishy flavor. The Delineator was a Butterick fashion magazine with a substantial household department, and recipes of this kind — cheap, quick, built from eggs and a sauce, served on toast — suited a readership assembling suppers and luncheons without much meat.