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Savory Eggs
6 hot hard-cooked eggs
Chopped parsley
Salt and pepper
Anchovy paste
¼ cup hot cream
6 slices hot buttered toast
1 cup hot thin white sauce
Cut the eggs in two lengthwise and remove the yolks. Mash the yolks, add seasonings, cream, parsley, anchovy or any desired relish, and refill the whites. Place on slices of toast and pour the white sauce over them.
A stuffed-egg supper dish from the era when a savoury on toast counted as a light meal. Everything must be hot at once, which is the only real difficulty.
- The hinge: keep it hotThe recipe says hot four times. Cook and shell the eggs, halve and fill them while they are still warm, and have the toast and sauce ready at the same moment. Cold filling piped into cold whites and doused in sauce turns claggy.
- Hard-cooked, not hard-boiledBring the eggs just to a boil, cover, and hold off the heat 10-12 minutes, then peel under warm water so the whites stay intact and the eggs stay warm. A hard rolling boil gives the green-grey ring around the yolk, which will tint the mashed filling.
- Thin white sauceIn this period a "thin" white sauce is 1 tablespoon each butter and flour per cup of milk; "medium" is 2 of each, "thick" 3 to 4. Thin is right here, since the sauce should coat and run into the toast rather than sit on top.
- Anchovy pasteStill sold in tubes and unchanged in character, but very salty. Start with about half a teaspoon for six yolks, taste, then salt the mixture only afterward.
- "Any desired relish"Here, following the anchovy, it most likely means a savoury flavouring paste rather than a pickle: potted shrimp, deviled ham, a bloater or sardine paste, mustard. Anything sharp and salty will do the same work.
- CreamA quarter cup of cream to six yolks is generous and gives a soft, spoonable filling. If you want to pipe the filling rather than spoon it, use half that.
- YieldSix servings as written, one slice of toast and two halves each. As a first course or brunch dish it will stretch to eight if you cut the toast into fingers.
- ToastUse a firm bread and toast it dry and well; buttered soft sandwich bread collapses under a cup of sauce before it reaches the table.
Filled eggs under a white sauce belong to the long line of English and American "savouries" -- small, strongly seasoned dishes served on toast, often at the end of dinner or at supper and breakfast. Anchovy in some preserved form was a common household source of savoury depth, and paste in a tube or pot was a pantry staple in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Gentleman's Relish, the best-known British version, is generally traced to the early 1800s. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published this sort of compilation for middle-class households running on modest budgets, and the egg chapters are where that shows most clearly: six eggs, a cup of sauce and some toast make a meal for six, and the anchovy is there to make it taste like more than it is.