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Egg Sauce (II)
Mrs. C. Belford.
Prepare drawn butter, and to this add three or four hard-boiled eggs sliced or chopped.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already know how to make drawn butter — the nineteenth-century butter-and-flour sauce that stands behind most Anglo-American fish and poultry sauces.
- Drawn butter, definedIn nineteenth-century American usage this generally meant butter thickened with flour and water rather than plain melted butter, though the term was also used loosely for melted butter alone. A workable version: about 2 tablespoons butter with 2 tablespoons flour, then whisked with a cup of hot water or light fish or chicken stock and finished with another lump of butter off the heat. Season with salt and a little white pepper. The recipe gives no quantities, so these are a reconstruction.
- Consistency is the hingeThe sauce should coat a spoon but still pour. Add the liquid gradually and off a hard boil, or the flour will lump; if it thickens too far on standing, loosen it with a spoonful of hot water rather than more butter.
- The eggsThree or four hard-boiled eggs is a generous amount for a cup of sauce, and gives something closer to a dressing than a sauce. Two is plenty if you want the eggs suspended rather than heaped.
- Boiling the eggsCover by an inch of water, bring to a boil, cover and leave off the heat 10-11 minutes, then cool in cold water. Yolks cooked longer turn chalky and green-rimmed and will muddy the sauce.
- Add the eggs lastFold them in after the sauce is off the heat. Held over a burner, the whites toughen and shed water, which thins the sauce.
- Yield and servingWith a cup of drawn butter as the base this makes about 1 1/2 cups, four to six servings; the recipe itself specifies no quantity of sauce. Egg sauce was a common accompaniment to poached or boiled salmon, cod and haddock, and was also served over boiled fowl and over salt cod.
- Optional additions of the periodOptional additions -- Lemon juice, chopped parsley, or a little of the fish's poaching liquid in place of water appear in period versions of egg sauce.
Drawn butter was a workhorse sauce of English and American kitchens for much of the nineteenth century — a plain white sauce that some households used where a trained cook might have made a French velouté — and adding chopped hard-boiled egg to it produced a common accompaniment to boiled fish. Its ancestry is generally traced to English "egg sauce" for salt cod and for boiled fowl, a pairing already standard in eighteenth-century English cookery books. That The Home Cook Book prints two versions of egg sauce, one after the other and each credited to a different contributor, is characteristic of the book: it was compiled from ladies' subscribed receipts, and the compilers set rival versions side by side rather than choosing between them. The attribution to Mrs. C. Belford is worth noting — Belford Brothers were Toronto publishers active in the 1870s, the period and place of the book's Canadian editions, though any connection between her and the publishing family is only speculation.