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Egg Fricassee
Cut three hard boiled eggs into slices. Put into one teacup of gravy or stock some minced parsley, a little chopped, cooked onion, a bit of butter and a little flour; simmer the mixture until thick, then add the sliced egg, one or two tablespoons of cream and salt and pepper to taste. Mix well, and serve very hot. This dish may be made richer by adding the beaten yolk of an egg to the cream, and, if preferred, the onion may be omitte.
A small, thrifty sauce dish that stands or falls on the sauce. The whole thing takes about ten minutes once the eggs are boiled.
- A teacup of stockA teacup in turn-of-the-century American books is generally reckoned at 6 fluid ounces, or three-quarters of a cup, though usage varied and some writers meant a full cup. Start with 3/4 cup and thin the sauce if it tightens too far.
- Butter and flour amounts"A bit of butter and a little flour" means a roux: about 1 tablespoon of each will thicken 3/4 cup of liquid to a coating sauce. Cook the flour in the butter for a minute before the stock goes in, or the sauce tastes raw and pasty.
- The hinge — the egg yolkIf you use the enriching yolk, beat it into the cream first, then temper that mixture with a spoonful of the hot sauce before it goes back into the pan, and keep the pan below a simmer afterward. Yolk added straight to boiling sauce will scramble into threads.
- Hard-boiled eggsEight to ten minutes off a gentle boil, then straight into cold water, gives set yolks without the grey-green ring. Slice them with a wet knife and fold them in only at the end so they hold their shape.
- The onionThe recipe calls for onion that is already cooked, not raw. A tablespoon of onion softened in butter until translucent, with no colour, does the job.
- ServingNo serving suggestion is given. Buttered toast, split biscuits, or rice would all suit a sauced egg dish of this kind. As written it feeds two as a light supper or breakfast.
- Heat at the table"Serve very hot" is doing real work here: a flour-thickened cream sauce skins over and goes gluey as it cools, and cold sliced egg is unpleasant. Warm the plates.
Fricassee in its older English sense meant anything cut up and stewed in a sauce rather than roasted, and by the nineteenth century American cookbooks were applying the word freely to chicken, veal, rabbit, and — as here — hard-boiled eggs. The Butterick books were published by the dress-pattern company as part of a broad household-advice programme aimed at middle-class women managing small budgets, and the recipe accordingly calls for no more than a teacup of gravy or stock and a cooked onion. Egg cookery filled a particular gap in that economy: eggs were cheap and near at hand, and a chapter of egg dishes gave a cook a set of dishes that still looked like proper made dishes. The optional yolk-and-cream enrichment at the end is a liaison, the standard classical French finish, offered here as an upgrade rather than assumed.