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Eggs a La Goldenrod
6 hard-cooked eggs
Salt and pepper
2 cups thin white sauce
Paprika
8 slices toast
Separate the yolks from the whites of the eggs and chop the whites very fine. Add to the white sauce with salt, pepper, paprika. Arrange six slices of toast on a platter and pour over them the white sauce mixture. Press the egg-yolks through a sieve and scatter over the top. Cut the two extra slices of toast into small triangles, or points, arrange on the platter and garnish with parsley.
A simple creamed-egg dish that lives or dies on the sauce. Everything else is assembly.
- "Thin white sauce"In period usage that is one tablespoon each of butter and flour per cup of milk, rather than the two-and-two of a medium sauce. Two cups therefore means 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour, 2 cups milk, cooked out for a couple of minutes so it does not taste of raw flour.
- Season the sauce properlyWith nothing but eggs and toast in play, the sauce carries the whole dish. Salt it more assertively than you think, and let the paprika bloom in the butter before the flour goes in if you want colour as well as flavour.
- Hard-cooked, not hard-boiledThe book's own term is the better one. Bring the eggs just to a boil, cover, take off the heat and leave 10-12 minutes, then cool in cold water. Sustained hard boiling gives the green-grey ring and a chalky yolk that will not sieve cleanly.
- Sieving the yolksA fine-mesh sieve and the back of a spoon give the fluffy, powdery threads that name the dish. Cold yolks push through more cleanly than warm ones, and the sieving should be done directly over the platter so the mound is not crushed.
- Toast timingMake the toast last and dress it immediately. Toast cut in advance, or sauced and left to stand, collapses into paste under two cups of sauce.
- YieldThe recipe states none, but six slices of toast would suit three to four people as a light supper or breakfast. The extra two slices are cut into points purely for the edge of the platter.
- PaprikaThe paprika ordinarily sold in American kitchens of this period was mild, used as much for colour as flavour. Sweet Hungarian paprika is the closest match; smoked or hot varieties will overwhelm the eggs.
Eggs a la Goldenrod, or simply goldenrod eggs, was a fixture of American cooking-school and household manuals, and the name is generally taken to be descriptive: the sieved yellow yolks scattered over white sauce are often said to resemble the flowering weed. It belongs to the same family as creamed eggs on toast and the countless "a la" dishes that domestic-science teachers of the period used to dress up cheap, shelf-stable ingredients. The appeal in a book like Butterick's is obvious. It uses eggs, milk, flour, butter and toast, requires no special equipment, feeds several people, and looks composed enough for a platter, which mattered in an era when the presentation of an inexpensive breakfast or Sunday supper was itself part of good housekeeping.