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Egg Sauce
Boil half a dozen eggs in a saucepan of water for six minutes; let them cool, remove the shells and cut up into small squares; melt eight tablespoonfuls of butter in a saucepan on the fire; add three tablespoonfuls of cream and a little salt and pepper and boil for five or six minutes. Put in the eggs and shake the pan over the fire until the eggs are hot; then add two tablespoonfuls more of butter and shake again until it is melted. Pour the sauce when ready into a sauceboat, and serve.
A butter-and-cream sauce bound by nothing but agitation, meant to go over poached fish. The whole thing succeeds or fails on temperature control.
- Keep it below a simmer once the eggs go inThere is no flour or roux here, so the sauce holds together only as an emulsion of butter in a little cream. Once the eggs are added, keep the pan moving over low heat; if it boils it will separate into oily butter and watery curds.
- Six minutes will not give you squaresA six-minute egg has a set white but a soft, only partly set yolk, and will not dice cleanly. For eggs firm enough to cut into neat cubes, cook 10 to 12 minutes and cool them in cold water. The instruction to cut into small squares argues for a hard-cooked egg.
- Butter quantityEight tablespoonfuls is half a cup (4 oz / 115 g), plus two more tablespoons finished at the end — ten tablespoons in all for six eggs. That ratio is correct for the style, not a misprint.
- The final butter is the pointThe recipe adds two more tablespoons of butter at the end and shakes until it melts, which thickens and glosses the sauce in the manner of mounting with butter. It does not specify the butter's temperature; stop heating as soon as it disappears.
- Boiling the cream for five or six minutesBoiled that long with the butter, three tablespoons of cream will concentrate considerably. Use heavy cream and watch the pan; a minute or two is enough to thicken it slightly.
- Shake, do not stirShaking the pan keeps the egg cubes whole. A spoon or whisk will shred them into a scramble, which is a different sauce entirely.
- Yield and servingRoughly two cups, counting the eggs. Serve it at once in a warmed sauceboat; it will not hold and cannot be reheated without breaking.
Egg sauce was a common nineteenth-century accompaniment to boiled or poached fish, salt cod among them, and it appears in English and American cookbooks in more than one form -- some thickened with flour and milk, others little more than melted butter with chopped egg. This version, from the 1896 cook book compiled by Oscar Tschirky, ma u00eetre d'h u00f4tel of the Waldorf, uses no flour at all and relies on butter and cream, which puts it nearer a butter sauce with eggs in it than a white sauce.