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Eggs a La Goldenrod
Hard Boiled Eggs Cream Sauce Parsley Salt and Pepper to Taste Prepare cream sauce. Remove the yolks from the whites of the eggs. Slice from the whites of the eggs. Slice the whites and add them to the cream sauce. sauce. Force the yolks through a potato , and sprinkle them over the top of cream sauce and whites, which have been arranged on a platter. Season and garnish with parsley.
Preservation of Fruits and Vegetables
A tidy little dish whose original text has suffered at the typesetter's hands — the duplicated lines and the missing word after "potato" are printing errors, not instructions. Everything hangs on the cream sauce, which the book assumes you already know how to make.
- The missing word"Force the yolks through a potato —" most likely read potato ricer; other books of the period call for a fine sieve. The point is to reduce the cooked yolks to loose golden crumbs; a box grater's fine side does the same job.
- Cream sauce, since the book won't tell youThe standard of the period is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it thickens and no longer tastes of raw flour. For six eggs make a double quantity, or the whites will be crowded.
- QuantitiesNo numbers are given anywhere. Six hard-boiled eggs, 2 cups of sauce and a handful of parsley serves four; the dish stretches easily by adding sauce rather than eggs.
- Boiling the eggsPeriod instructions often meant a hard 15-minute boil, which is what produces the grey-green ring and sulphurous edge. Bring to a boil, cover, take off the heat for 10–12 minutes, then chill in cold water — the yolks stay yellow and rice more cleanly.
- What it is served onGoldenrod eggs are almost always spooned over buttered toast, though this version says only "platter." Toast points arranged around the edge keep the sauce from spreading into a puddle.
- SeasoningSalt and white pepper are better worked into the sauce than added at the end; once the yolks are scattered on top, stirring seasoning through ruins the effect.
- TimingAssemble at the last moment. The riced yolk absorbs moisture from the sauce within a few minutes and the contrast of gold on white collapses.
The name is generally taken to be purely visual: the sieved yellow yolk scattered over white sauce is traditionally said to have resembled the plumes of goldenrod, the tall late-summer wildflower common across North America. Dishes of this kind — eggs, a white sauce, toast — belong to the great age of the chafing dish and the Sunday supper, when a hostess was expected to produce something presentable without a cook and without a range. The recipe assumes its reader can already make a cream sauce and boil an egg, and offers instead a way of arranging those two humble things so they look like a composed dish. Goldenrod eggs are often said to have become a fixture of American home economics classes and school cafeterias, where they are reported to have survived well into the twentieth century under the name eggs goldenrod.