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Egg Sauce
I chopped hard-cooked egg
1 cup medium white sauce
Combine the two ingredients.
Two lines because the book assumes you already know how to make white sauce. The whole dish rests on that base, so the notes below mostly concern it.
- What "medium" white sauce meansPeriod American cookbooks commonly graded white sauce by the fat and flour per cup of milk: roughly 1 tablespoon each for thin, 2 for medium, 3 to 4 for thick. Medium here would be about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon.
- Cook the roux before the milk goes inLet the butter and flour bubble together a minute or two over low heat so the sauce does not taste of raw flour. Add the milk gradually and whisk; a sauce this thick will lump if the milk goes in all at once.
- The eggOne egg, hard-cooked and chopped, to a cup of sauce. Start the eggs in cold water, bring to a boil, cover and leave off the heat about 10 minutes, then cool in cold water; that avoids the grey-green ring around the yolk that shows badly against a white sauce.
- Add the egg off the heatStir it in at the end and keep the sauce below a simmer afterwards. Prolonged heat makes the whites rubbery and they break down into shreds when stirred.
- Seasoning the book leaves outSalt and white pepper are assumed in the base sauce. A little lemon juice, chopped parsley or a grating of nutmeg is traditional with fish and worth adding at the end.
- Yield and useAbout a generous cup, enough for roughly four servings of poached or baked fish. It is a traditional sauce for salt cod, finnan haddie and boiled fowl.
- Holding itIf it must wait, keep it over hot, not boiling, water and press plastic wrap or a butter-rubbed paper on the surface to stop a skin forming. Thin with a spoonful of milk when reheating.
Egg sauce belongs to the English white-sauce family, and it travelled to American tables as the near-obligatory accompaniment to boiled salt fish, particularly the salt cod of New England. Its appearance in a Butterick volume is telling: the book belongs to the era when white sauce was taught as a system rather than a recipe, with thin, medium and thick grades memorized in proportions and then varied by whatever was stirred in at the end. Give the same base an egg and it dresses fish; give it cheese, or parsley, or oysters, and it becomes another sauce entirely. Domestic-science teaching of the period, which shaped cookbooks like this one, leaned hard on that kind of tabulated, proportional cooking, which is why the instruction here can be reduced to four words.