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Roman Sauce
Put one tea-cup water and one tea-cup milk on fire to scald, and when hot stir in a table-spoon flour, previously mixed smooth with a very little cold water, add three eggs well beaten and strained, season with salt and pepper, two table-spoons butter and a little vinegar; boil four eggs hard, slice and lay over the dish; pour over sauce, and serve with boiled fish. - Mrs. E. T. E.
An egg sauce for poached or boiled fish, thickened first with flour and then with whole eggs. The only real difficulty is keeping the eggs from scrambling.
- Teacup measureA teacup in American books of this period is usually reckoned at less than a modern 8-ounce cup, commonly around 3/4 cup (6 fl oz), though usage varied from book to book. Taking it as 3/4 cup each of water and milk gives roughly 2 cups of finished sauce once eggs and butter are in -- enough for about four servings.
- The hinge: never let it boil after the eggs go inThree whole eggs in under two cups of liquid is a thin custard. Once the eggs are stirred in, hold the pan below a simmer (about 160-175F) and stir constantly until it coats a spoon. A boil will curdle it into fish-flavoured scrambled egg.
- Temper the eggsRather than adding beaten eggs straight to the hot pan, whisk a ladleful of the hot floury milk into them first, then return the mixture to the pan off the direct heat. The original wording assumes a cook standing over a stove that can be moved away from the fire.
- Straining the eggsStraining beaten eggs is not fussiness -- it removes the chalazae and any albumen strings, which would show as white threads in a pale sauce. Worth doing.
- Vinegar last, off the heatAcid speeds curdling. Add the vinegar -- start with a teaspoon or two of cider or white wine vinegar and taste -- after the sauce has thickened and been pulled from the heat.
- ButterTwo tablespoons stirred in at the end, off the heat, in pieces. This is what gives the sauce its gloss; melting it in early does nothing for the texture.
- The hard-boiled eggsFour eggs sliced over the fish, with the sauce poured across, means this is really two components. Cook them about 10 minutes, cool in cold water, and slice with a wet knife or an egg slicer so the yolks stay whole.
- What to serve it withWritten for plainly boiled white fish -- cod, haddock, halibut -- where a rich egg sauce carries the whole dish. It also suits poached salmon. Make it while the fish is cooking; it does not reheat without breaking.
Egg sauce with boiled fish is one of the fixed pairings of nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery: a plain-boiled piece of cod or haddock was considered barely edible without something rich poured over it, and hard-boiled egg was the cheapest available richness. Sauces of this kind appear under many names -- egg sauce, Dutch sauce, Hollandaise (which in period books could mean a flour-thickened sauce rather than the emulsion we mean now, though butter-and-yolk versions with vinegar are also common) -- and "Roman" is best read as one of the decorative continental labels American compilers liked to attach to a familiar preparation rather than as evidence of any Italian origin. Its apparent presence in The Dixie Cook Book, signed only with initials, is typical of how these volumes were assembled: publishers gathered contributions from readers and local subscribers, so a single sauce could circulate widely under different names and different sets of initials.