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Egg Sauce for Fowl
Melt without browning two ounces of butter in a saucepan; add two tablespoonfuls of flour and mix until smooth; pour in two breakfast cupfuls of boiling water, adding a little at a time, and stir quickly until thick; then add two ounces more of butter and half a teaspoonful each of salt and pepper and, last of all, three hardboiled eggs chopped fine. After removing the pan from the fire stir well, when the sauce is ready for use
A plain white sauce built on water rather than milk or stock, finished with butter and chopped egg. It comes together in about ten minutes.
- Breakfast cupfulAn old breakfast cup holds roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Two cupfuls of water to 2 oz butter and 2 tablespoons flour gives a fairly thin sauce; use a level 2 cups (16 fl oz) and reduce a little if you want it to coat.
- Butter weightsTwo ounces is 4 tablespoons, half a stick. The recipe uses 4 oz in total: half in the roux, half stirred in off the heat.
- Water, not milkThe liquid is boiling water, which keeps the sauce pale and lets the egg and butter carry the flavor. Well-skimmed chicken broth in place of the water is closer to what a modern kitchen would do for fowl; if you use it, hold back on the salt, since the broth brings its own.
- The hingeThe second 2 oz of butter goes in as an enrichment, and the pan comes off the fire before the final stirring. Boiled hard after the butter is added, the sauce will break and go greasy.
- Cook the flourThe recipe says only to melt the butter without browning and mix the flour in until smooth; giving the flour a minute to bubble before the water goes in, added in small amounts with hard stirring each time, is what prevents a raw-flour taste and lumps.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of pepper in two cups of sauce is assertive by modern standards. Start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust; season again after the eggs go in.
- EggsThree hard-boiled eggs chopped fine will thicken the sauce noticeably as it stands. Add them at the last moment so they stay in distinct pieces rather than dissolving into paste.
- YieldAbout two and a half cups, enough for a roast or boiled fowl serving six to eight. It does not reheat well; the egg firms and the butter separates.
Egg sauce belongs to the large family of English butter-and-flour sauces that American hotel kitchens inherited and kept on the line for decades, poured over boiled fowl, salt cod, and finnan haddie alike. Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his Cook Book in 1896 as a compendium of the house repertoire, and sauces like this one show the unglamorous backbone of that repertoire: a roux, hot liquid, butter to finish, and one cheap ingredient to give it a name. The use of boiling water rather than milk or veal stock marks it as a sauce meant to be made quickly and in quantity, often for boiled poultry where the bird's own broth was already at hand. Chopped hard-boiled egg as a garnish and thickener in fish and fowl sauces is generally traced to English cookery of the eighteenth century, and it survived in American hotel and boarding-house cooking long after fancier French sauces had displaced it on the printed menu.