Scalloped Eggs
3 "hard-boiled " eggs ¾ cup chopped cold meat 1 pint White Sauce I ¾ cup buttered cracker crumbs Chop eggs finely. Sprinkle bottom of a buttered baking dish with crumbs, cover with one-half the eggs, eggs with sauce, and sauce with meat; repeat. Cover with remaining crumbs. Place in oven on centre grate, and bake until crumbs are brown. Ham is the best meat to use for this dish. Chicken, veal, or fish may be used.
A tidy way to use up cold roast meat and leftover boiled eggs, built in layers like a gratin. Everything in it is already cooked, so the bake is only to heat through and brown the top.
- The fractionsThe two quantities printed as "34 cup" are three-quarters of a cup — that is 3/4 cup chopped cold meat and 3/4 cup buttered cracker crumbs.
- White Sauce IThe book's first white sauce is a fairly standard medium one; check its own recipe for exact proportions. Failing that, a pint made with about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to each cup of milk, seasoned with salt and a little pepper, will do. Make it slightly looser than you think you want, since the crumbs will drink some of it.
- Buttered crumbs"Buttered cracker crumbs" means crumbs tossed with melted butter — roughly 2 tablespoons butter to 3/4 cup crumbs. Unbuttered crumbs will scorch in patches instead of browning evenly. Saltines or any plain soda cracker work; panko is a reasonable stand-in.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given because the original cook judged by the fire. Use 400F and bake 15 to 20 minutes, until the sauce bubbles at the edges and the top is golden. "Centre grate" simply means the middle rack.
- Chop, do not sliceThe recipe calls for the eggs to be chopped fine rather than sliced, so they distribute through the sauce instead of sitting in solid layers.
- MeatCooked ham is the recommendation and still the best choice — it seasons the whole dish. Any cooked chicken, veal or flaked white fish will do, but bland meat needs the sauce salted more assertively, plus mustard or a grating of nutmeg.
- YieldThree eggs and a pint of sauce fills a small 1-quart dish and serves three as a light supper, two if it is the whole meal. It doubles without difficulty in a 9-inch square dish.
Scalloped dishes were common in thrift cookery in American kitchens around 1900: a buttered dish, crumbs, a bound sauce, and whatever cold cooked food was left from an earlier meal. "Scalloped" is often traced to cooking and serving in a scallop shell, though the word's derivation is disputed; in any case it came to mean a dish layered with crumbs and sauce and browned on top. Egg chapters of this period carry several such constructions, using up eggs boiled earlier in the day. The quotation marks the book puts around "hard-boiled" may reflect a view common in the period, and expressed elsewhere in books of this kind, that eggs are better cooked gently below boiling than at a rolling bubble.