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Parsley (Make a thin white sauce)
Make a thin white sauce with butter, flour, milk, and seasonings. Separate yolks from whites of eggs. Chop whites finely, and add them to the sauce. Cut four slices of toast in halves lengthwise. Arrange on platter, and pour over the sauce. Force the yolks through a potato ricer or strainer, sprinkling over the top. Garnish with parsley and remaining toast, cut in points.
This is the dish usually called eggs à la goldenrod: hard-cooked eggs in white sauce over toast, the yolks riced on top for colour. The book assumes you already know the white sauce proportions and that the eggs are hard-cooked, so both need filling in.
- The eggs are hard-cookedNothing in the text says so, but the whites must be firm enough to chop and the yolks dry enough to push through a ricer. Cook the eggs in water held just below a simmer for about 12 minutes, then cool them in cold water so the yolks stay yellow rather than turning grey-green.
- What "thin white sauce" meansA thin white sauce is conventionally 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour to 1 cup of milk, with about 1/4 teaspoon salt and a little white pepper. For four slices of toast, make 1 1/2 to 2 cups; a medium sauce (2 tablespoons each per cup) holds better on the toast if you like it less runny.
- Cook the flour before the milk goes inMelt the butter, stir in the flour, and let the roux bubble a minute or two before adding warm milk gradually. Skipping this leaves a raw, pasty taste that the mild seasoning here does nothing to hide.
- Seasonings"Seasonings" in this period means salt and pepper, with white pepper preferred so the sauce stays unspeckled. A scrape of nutmeg is traditional in white sauce and not out of place.
- The ricerA potato ricer or fine sieve gives the fine golden threads the dish is named for. A box grater on the fine side works as well; a food processor does not, as it packs the yolk into paste.
- Assembly timingToast, sauce and riced yolk all need to meet at once. Have the toast cut and the yolks pressed before the sauce goes on, since the sauce skins over within a couple of minutes and the toast turns soggy fast.
- Toast pointsSome of the half-slices are held back and cut diagonally into points for the edge of the platter; the recipe does not say how many. This is presentation only and can be skipped without harm to the dish.
- YieldAs written, four slices of toast serve two generously or four as a light course. It scales directly.
Creamed hard-cooked eggs on toast appears across late nineteenth-century American cookery under several names, among them eggs à la goldenrod, the riced yolk being taken for the flower's yellow plume. The recipe gives no proportions at all and no oven, no pan and no times. It expects a cook who has already done the drills. The dish belonged to the same breakfast and chafing-dish repertoire as creamed dried beef, which it closely resembles in method.