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Egg Sauce II
To Drawn Butter Sauce add beaten yolks of two eggs and one teaspoon lemon juice.
Brown Sauce I 2 tablespoons butter 1½ slice onion 3 tablespoons flour 1 cup Brown Stock ¼ teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Cook onion in butter until slightly browned; remove onion and stir butter constantly until well browned; add flour mixed with seasonings, and brown the butter and flour; then add stock gradually, bring to the boiling-point, and let boil two minutes.
Brown Sauce II (Espagnole) 1/4 cup butter 1 slice carrot 1 slice onion Bit of bay leaf Sprig of thyme Sprig of parsley 6 peppercorns 5 tablespoons flour 2 cups Brown Stock Salt and pepper Cook butter with carrot, onion, bay leaf, thyme, parsley, and peppercorns, until brown, stirring constantly, care being taken that butter is not allowed to burn; add flour, and when well browned, add stock gradually. Bring to boilingpoint, strain, and season with salt and pepper. Brown Mushroom Sauce I To one cup Brown Sauce add one-fourth can mushrooms, drained, rinsed, and cut in quarters or slices.
Egg Sauce II is a one-line variation: it turns Drawn Butter Sauce into a yolk-thickened sauce for boiled fish. Everything depends on how the yolks go in.
- Drawn Butter SauceThis is not melted butter in the modern British sense but the book's flour-thickened butter sauce, made elsewhere in the volume from butter, flour, hot water and seasoning, with the remaining butter worked in at the end.
- Tempering the yolksTake the sauce off the heat, beat a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce into the yolks, then return the mixture to the pan. Added straight to a simmering sauce the yolks will scramble into threads.
- Do not reboilOnce the yolks are in, keep the sauce well below a simmer and only long enough to thicken. Hard boiling risks curdling the yolks.
- Lemon lastThe teaspoon of lemon juice is best stirred in after the heat is off, once the yolks have thickened.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half, a serving sauce for boiled white fish.
- Reading the brown sauce quantitiesWhere the salt measure appears as "14 teaspoon," read one-quarter teaspoon; the fraction bar has been lost in printing.
- Canned mushroomsThe recipe gives 'one-fourth can' without a can size, so the quantity is approximate; fresh mushrooms, sliced and sauteed in butter first, can be substituted to taste.
Egg sauce belongs to the long Anglo-American tradition of serving boiled white fish and salt cod under something rich enough to compensate for plain cooking; New England cookbooks of the nineteenth century print it beside oyster sauce and lobster sauce for exactly that purpose. It took several forms, more often chopped hard-cooked egg in drawn butter than the yolk-and-lemon version. Fannie Farmer's arrangement here is characteristic of the Boston Cooking-School method: one foundation sauce is taught in full, and the variations that follow are a single sentence apiece, on the assumption that the cook has already mastered the base. The brown sauces printed alongside show the same logic borrowed from French practice, where espagnole built on brown stock is often said to have served as the mother of a whole family of derivative sauces.