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Eggs Au Gratin
6 hard-cooked eggs
Grated cheese
Salt and pepper
Buttered crums
2 cups medium white, tomato Butter or yellow sauce
Remove the shells from the eggs, slice them and arrange in a greased baking-dish. Season with salt and pepper and pour the sauce over them. Yellow sauce may be made from white sauce by adding uncooked beaten egg-yolk to white sauce. Sprinkle with grated cheese and cover with buttered crums. Bake in a moderate oven until the sauce bubbles and the crums brown. CHEESE DISHES
A tidy example of the old white-sauce-and-crumb school of cookery, where a can of nothing and six eggs became a supper dish. The original assumes you already know how to make a medium white sauce, so that is where most of the work sits.
- Medium white sauceStandard proportion of the period is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk per cup of sauce, so 4 tablespoons each of butter and flour to 2 cups milk. Cook the roux a minute before adding milk or the finished dish tastes pasty.
- "Crums"Buttered crumbs means about 1 cup of soft fresh breadcrumbs tossed with 2 tablespoons melted butter until each crumb is coated. Dry commercial crumbs brown faster and can scorch before the sauce bubbles.
- Moderate oven350F. The dish is only reheating and browning, so 20 to 25 minutes is usually enough; watch the crumbs rather than the clock.
- Yellow sauceBeat the raw yolk with a little of the hot sauce first, then stir it back in off the heat. Dropped straight into simmering sauce it curdles into threads, and no amount of baking will smooth them out.
- The grated cheeseUnspecified; in American cookery of this sort it generally meant a dry aged cheddar or a hard "store cheese." Two to three ounces is about right; much more and the sauce is apt to turn greasy under the crust.
- Hard-cooked eggsCover with cold water, bring just to a boil, then hold off the heat 10 to 12 minutes. Eggs boiled hard turn rubbery and grey-green at the yolk, which the sauce cannot hide.
- Tomato variationIf you use tomato sauce rather than white, it is safer to leave out the yolk enrichment: yolk stirred into an acidic sauce is more prone to curdling.
- YieldSix eggs in 2 cups of sauce serves three as a light main course with toast, or four to six as a side dish.
"Au gratin" describes the crust rather than the cheese: the word derives from the French gratter, to scrape, generally taken to refer to the browned top scraped from the dish, and grated crumbs and cheese were a reliable way to get it. Eggs were a staple protein in early twentieth-century American household cookery, and books of this sort devote whole chapters to stretching a half-dozen hard-cooked eggs into a meal with milk, flour and butter. The terse style here, which assumes the reader already commands a white sauce, is typical of the audience for such domestic manuals. The spelling "crums" turns up in American cookbooks of the period, and "crum" was among the forms urged by the simplified-spelling movement that also promoted "thru" and "catalog."