Home › Left-Over Poultry › Egg Sauce
Egg Sauce
Place two eggs in rapidly boiling water, cover tightly, remove to cooler part of stove, and let stand six minutes. The whites should be solid and yolks soft. Beat in the soft yolks and add the chopped whites to one cup of white sauce No. 2.
Just before serving add one teaspoonful chopped parsley. Serve with boiled fish.
A medium white sauce enriched with barely-set eggs, meant for a platter of boiled fish. The whole thing takes about ten minutes once the sauce base is made.
- White sauce No. 2In books that number their white sauces the numbering generally runs thin to thick, and a medium pouring sauce of this type is usually something on the order of 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon; check the book's own No. 2 rather than assuming. Season it with salt and white pepper before the eggs go in, since neither egg nor parsley brings any salt.
- "Cooler part of stove"This assumes a wood or coal range with a temperature gradient across the top. On a modern hob, bring the water to a rolling boil, lower the eggs in, cover, and take the pan off the heat entirely.
- The six minutesSix minutes off the heat suited eggs starting at room temperature. Eggs straight from the refrigerator will need somewhat longer, covered, to set the whites; check one before committing both.
- Soft yolksThe yolks stay liquid and are beaten into the hot sauce as a thickener and enricher, which is the point of the dish. Keep the sauce below a simmer once they are in or the yolk will granulate. Anyone avoiding undercooked egg should use pasteurised eggs or hard-cook them and chop both parts.
- Chopping the whitesPeel under cold running water and chop. The recipe does not specify how fine; a coarser chop leaves visible flecks of white in the finished sauce.
- Parsley lastAdded at the end for colour; held in hot sauce it goes drab. Flat-leaf is fine, though curly was the parsley more usual in Anglo-American kitchens of this period.
- YieldOne cup of sauce plus two chopped eggs, so somewhat more than a cup; the recipe gives no serving count. It thickens as it stands; loosen with a spoonful of hot milk or the fish's poaching liquid.
Egg sauce is a familiar fixture of English and New England fish cookery, poured over boiled cod, haddock or salt fish where a wine-based sauce would have been thought extravagant. The combination of white sauce, hard eggs and parsley is broadly the same formula that appears in nineteenth-century manuals under names like "drawn butter with eggs." The cross-reference to "white sauce No. 2" is the tell — books of this kind seem to have assumed the reader worked from a small set of memorised bases, which may be why so many of their recipes read as three lines long.