Home › Eggs › Eggs à la Sidney
Eggs à la Sidney
Arrange "hard-boiled" eggs, cut in thirds lengthwise, on pieces of toasted bread. Pour over eggs Soubise Sauce.
A two-line assembly recipe that assumes you already have the book's Soubise Sauce and know how Farmer wanted eggs cooked. Both assumptions need filling in.
- Why "hard-boiled" is in quotation marksProbably a signal, though the page does not say so: elsewhere in the egg chapter Farmer prefers eggs that never actually boil, but sit in water held just off the boil so the white stays tender. Cover the eggs with boiling water, keep them below a simmer until set through — Farmer's standing times are longer than a modern hard boil — then cool them in cold water so the shells slip.
- Soubise Sauce, in shortIt is a white sauce enriched with onion. Cook a large sliced or chopped onion gently in butter without browning, cook it until entirely soft, then either press it through a sieve or purée it and stir it into about a cup of medium white sauce (2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk). Season with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. Modern versions often finish with a spoonful of cream.
- Keep the onion paleThe hinge of the dish. If the onion takes any colour, the sauce turns beige and sweet-edged instead of clean and white, and there is nothing else on the plate to hide it. Butter, low heat, a lid, and stir often.
- Cut in thirds lengthwiseOdd to modern eyes. Three long wedges sit flat and fan across the toast where halves roll, though the recipe offers no reason for the instruction. Quarters work as well if the eggs are large.
- The toastCut the crusts and toast the bread dry and firm — soft sandwich bread collapses under a cup of sauce within a minute. Serve immediately for the same reason; this is not a dish that waits.
- Seasoning the eggs themselvesThe original salts nothing but the sauce. Sprinkle the cut eggs lightly with salt and pepper before saucing, or the yolks read flat against a well-seasoned sauce.
- YieldTwo eggs and one slice of toast per person makes a lunch or supper dish; a cup of sauce covers four to six eggs.
Soubise sauce is generally traced to the household of Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, an eighteenth-century Marshal of France whose kitchen is traditionally credited with the onion purée that carries his name; like most such attributions it is culinary lore rather than documented fact. What matters for this page is how the sauce travelled: by the 1890s French sauce-making had been absorbed into American cooking-school teaching, and the hard-cooked eggs here appear under Soubise, the variation given a French-sounding name. "À la Sidney" is not a classical designation and its origin is unrecorded.