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Eggs à la Goldenrod
3 "hard-boiled" eggs 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup milk ½ teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 5 slices toast
This is the Boston Cooking-School's standard format: the ingredients are listed first and the method follows the printed table. What matters here is the assembly, since the components themselves are plain.
- The method in briefMelt the butter, stir in the flour, add the milk and cook to a smooth white sauce. Chop the egg whites and stir them into the sauce, pour it over the toast, then force the yolks through a sieve over the top.
- The hinge: sieve the yolks, don't crumble themThe whole point of the dish is the fine, feathery yellow that gives it the goldenrod name. Push the cooked yolks through a fine-mesh sieve with the back of a spoon directly over the plated toast; chopping or mashing gives a wet, pasty look instead.
- The salt looks wrongOne and a half teaspoons of salt in one cup of white sauce is very heavy by modern taste. Start with ½ teaspoon and adjust.
- "Hard-boiled" in quotation marksFarmer taught that eggs should be cooked below the boil rather than boiled outright, which is likely why the term is set in quotes; her directions for hard-cooked eggs call for holding them in water just under simmering for a long stretch, up to about three-quarters of an hour. Twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then an ice bath, gets you a tender white without a green ring rather faster.
- White sauce consistencyOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk is a thin sauce, right for pouring over toast. Cook the roux a minute before adding milk so it does not taste of raw flour, and add the milk gradually to keep it smooth.
- YieldFive slices of toast, which would stretch to perhaps three or four breakfast portions, or two larger ones. Assemble at the last minute; the toast softens quickly under the sauce.
Eggs à la Goldenrod was a fixture of American breakfast and luncheon tables around the turn of the twentieth century, and the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book helped fix its form. The name is generally taken to be visual: the sieved yolk scattered over white sauce was said to resemble the plumes of goldenrod, a wildflower then common in New England fields. Dishes of this kind — a cup of white sauce, something chopped into it, toast underneath — figure prominently in Fannie Farmer's teaching, since they let a student practice one basic sauce and then vary it endlessly with eggs, dried beef, oysters or leftover fish. The habit of dressing up hard-cooked eggs and toast with a French preposition was widespread in the period, and says more about the prestige of French cooking in American cookbooks than about any French original.