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Savory Eggs
Put two or three hard boiled eggs into cold water; when cool enough take off the shells and cut the eggs in two lengthwise; remove the yolks, powder and mix with cream, pepper, salt, butter and anchovy, chopped parsley or any other relish. Put the mixture back into the hollows, pour a good white sauce over the halves and serve them on buttered toast.
A stuffed-egg dish meant to be eaten hot under sauce rather than chilled as a picnic deviled egg. The white sauce is doing most of the work, so make it before the eggs cool.
- The hingeServe this hot and assembled at the last minute. Filled halves sitting under sauce will weep and the toast will collapse; have sauce, eggs and toast ready within a minute or two of each other.
- Cooling the eggsThe cold-water plunge is not decoration. It stops the cooking and helps the shell come away more easily, and it limits the grey-green ring where yolk meets white.
- "Anchovy"In household books of this period the word usually points to anchovy paste or anchovy essence, both sold ready-made. A half teaspoon of paste, or one mashed oil-packed fillet, per two eggs is a reasonable modern reading; it is a seasoning, not a filling.
- "Any other relish"Read this as any sharp savory accent: mustard, grated cheese, capers, minced ham, a little curry powder. The period sense of "relish" is something to give flavor, not a jar of sweet pickle.
- Powdering the yolksPush the yolks through a fine sieve rather than mashing them with a fork. Sieved yolk takes the cream smoothly and gives a filling you can mound instead of a lumpy paste.
- The white sauceA standard bechamel: 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 cup milk, cooked out for a couple of minutes so it does not taste of raw flour. Keep it loose enough to pour and season it lightly, since the filling is already salted and the anchovy is salty.
- YieldTwo or three eggs makes four to six halves, which is one generous lunch serving or two small first courses. Scale at one to two eggs per person and count on one slice of toast each.
- ToastUse a firm bread and toast it dry and well before buttering. Soft sandwich bread will not survive the sauce.
Hot stuffed eggs under white sauce belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian repertoire of "made dishes" — turning cheap staples into something worth putting on a plate — and they show up throughout the egg chapters of American household manuals of the period. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, also published a cook book. Anchovy paste and essence are the tell of the period; British and American kitchens leaned hard on bottled fish seasonings for savory depth, much as a modern cook reaches for soy sauce or Worcestershire. Eggs served on buttered toast under a sauce also fit the era's habit of building dishes on a starch foundation, the same logic behind creamed chipped beef and the many "on toast" entries that fill breakfast and luncheon menus of the time.