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Creamed Poached Eggs
Poach Eggs in Hot Salted Water Place on Platter and Cover with Sauce Made as Follows: 1/2 Cup Rich Milk Butter 1/2 Tablespoon Cornstarch Salt and Pepper to Taste Combine as white sauce. Pour over poached eggs.
A terse recipe even by the standards of 1900s bridal cookbooks: two techniques compressed into three lines, with the butter quantity left to the cook's judgment. The sauce is the part that needs interpreting.
- The missing butter measureNo amount is given. Period white sauce proportions pair butter and thickener in roughly equal measure, which for 1/2 tablespoon cornstarch suggests about 1/2 tablespoon of butter; a full tablespoon makes a notably rich sauce. Too much butter will read greasy rather than smooth.
- "Rich milk"This means milk with the cream not yet skimmed off, so richer than modern whole milk, though how much richer was never fixed. Whole milk works, but the sauce will be thinner and blander; a splash of cream restores it.
- Cornstarch, not flourCornstarch sets more clearly and needs less cooking than a flour roux, but it must reach a full boil to thicken and lose its raw taste. Whisk it into cold milk first, then heat, or it will lump. Once thickened, take it off the heat — prolonged boiling thins a cornstarch sauce back out.
- Order of workMake the sauce first and hold it covered off the heat. Poached eggs cool quickly once out on a platter, and the sauce is the easier of the two to hold.
- Poaching waterSalted water is what the recipe says; some period cooks added a little vinegar to the water to help the whites hold together, though this recipe does not. Keep the water at a bare quiver, not a boil, and count about 3 minutes for a set white and a liquid yolk.
- YieldHalf a cup of milk makes a small amount of sauce — enough to nap two eggs well, or four thinly. Double it if you are feeding more.
Creamed eggs sit close to what is often said to have been a turn-of-the-century bride's first lesson in cookery: the white sauce. Many American cookbooks of the era taught it as a single foundational lesson — milk, fat, starch, salt — then ran it through dozens of variations over eggs, fish, chipped beef, potatoes and vegetables, which is why this recipe assumes the reader already knows what "combine as white sauce" means and spends no words on it. The choice of cornstarch rather than flour is worth noting: cornstarch was heavily promoted to American home cooks through the late nineteenth century as a modern, refined product, and it turns up in period sauces, puddings and pie fillings alike. Dishes like this one were the backbone of the light supper and the invalid tray, where something warm, bland and quickly made was the point.