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Eggs, Au Gratin
Boil the eggs hard, peel and cut them in slices, and lay them in a deep dish in close circular rows. Make a sauce of a tablespoon of butter, the yolks of four eggs, a little grated cheese and one-half cup of sweet milk. Stir this over the fire until it thickens, pour it over the eggs, strew some bread crumbs on the top and bake for about ten minutes. Serve hot.
EGGS À LA LUCCHESE-Fry an onion nearly brown, add onehalf pint of milk and six halved hard boiled eggs. Stir over a slow fire three or four minutes, and add the beaten yolks of two eggs, a dessertspoon of chopped parsley, an ounce of grated cheese and a pinch each of paprika, pepper and salt. Stir over a slow fire for six or eight minutes, squeeze lemon juice over the whole, and serve very hot.
CHAUD-FROID OF EGGS (Cold) -Hard boil the necessary number of eggs and when cool cut in halves lengthwise. Remove yolks and mash them to a paste with a little melted butter, pepper, salt, paprika and either chopped olives or pickles. Put the two halves together with a little moistened gelatine to hold them in place until masked in the Chaud-Froid Sauce (See Chapter on Sauces for Meat, Fish, Poultry and Game). These eggs may be made very ornamental by garnishing each one with a star or diamond cut from a pimento, a green pepper or a truffle, and should be served very cold as a luncheon or supper dish.
Three related dishes built on hard-boiled eggs, all from a period when a printed recipe assumed the cook could supply quantities and temperatures herself. The gratin gives no egg count and no oven heat; the notes below fill the gaps.
- Quantity for the gratinThe original never says how many eggs to boil. Six to eight hard-boiled eggs, sliced, will fill a deep dish of about a quart in the "close circular rows" described. The sauce as written — 1 tablespoon butter, four yolks, half a cup of milk — is about right for that quantity.
- The hinge: the sauce is a custardFour yolks in half a cup of milk with no flour is a stirred custard, not a béchamel. Held over direct heat it will scramble. Use a heavy pan over low heat or a bowl set over simmering water, stir constantly, and pull it off at about 170-175F, when it coats the spoon. It will look thin next to a modern cheese sauce; that is correct.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, as distinct from the soured or buttermilk that older recipes also called for. Nothing is sweetened.
- Oven heatNone is given, and ten minutes is only long enough to set the surface and colour the crumbs, since everything in the dish is already cooked. A hot oven — in the region of 425F — should do it. Buttering or frying the crumbs first gives better colour in that short a time.
- The cheese"A little grated cheese" here most likely means a firm dry cheese for flavour, not for stretch — Parmesan or a well-aged Cheddar. Two to three tablespoons in the sauce would be in keeping. Add it off the heat so the yolks do not tighten.
- DessertspoonIn the Eggs à la Lucchese, a dessertspoon is two teaspoons — a spoon size between the teaspoon and the tablespoon that has since disappeared from American measuring sets.
- Timing the LuccheseThe second stirring of "six or eight minutes" over a slow fire is long for two yolks in half a pint of milk. Judge by thickness rather than the clock and take it off before it curdles; the lemon juice goes in last, off the heat, or it will help the milk break.
- Chaud-froid needs another pageThat recipe is only half a recipe — the masking sauce lives in the sauce chapter. A chaud-froid sauce is a velouté or béchamel set with aspic or gelatine, chilled to the point where it just coats before it is spooned over the eggs. Plan on chilling the stuffed eggs firm before masking, and on two thin coats rather than one thick one.
Au gratin means nothing more than finished with a browned crust — from the French gratter, to scrape, for the crisp topping scraped from the dish — and by the time the Butterick Publishing Company issued this cook book the phrase had become a stock American label for anything baked under crumbs and cheese. The three dishes here belong to a distinct genre of the period: ways to make hard-boiled eggs look like a course. Eggs were cheap, plentiful in season, and a household with hens had more of them than it could use fresh, so cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s carried whole chapters of dressed-up boiled eggs for luncheon and supper, the lighter meals a hostess served without a joint of meat. The chaud-froid — literally "hot-cold," a sauce made hot and served cold, set with gelatine — is the most ambitious of the three and shows the reach of French restaurant cookery into the American home kitchen, complete with truffle cut into diamonds. The name à la Lucchese points to Lucca in Tuscany, though such garnish names were applied loosely in English-language books and generally cannot be traced to a particular place or cook.