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Egg Sauce
Miss Hattie Buck.
Take the yolks of two eggs boiled hard: mash them with a teaspoon of mustard, a little pepper and salt, three tablespoons of vinegar, and three of salad oil. A tablespoon of catsup improves this for some. Nice for boiled fish.
A cooked-yolk dressing in the manner of sauce gribiche, put together cold in a bowl in about five minutes. The whole thing hinges on getting the yolks perfectly smooth before any liquid goes in.
- Sieve the yolks firstMashing with a fork leaves grains that never disperse. Push the hard-cooked yolks through a fine sieve, then work the mustard and seasoning into the powder to a paste before adding anything wet.
- What kind of mustardIn an 1870s American receipt an unqualified "teaspoon of mustard" may well mean dry English mustard powder rather than a prepared jar mustard, though both were in use. Powder gives the sharper, cleaner result the vinegar-and-oil balance seems to expect; prepared mustard will work but adds its own vinegar, so cut back the three tablespoons of vinegar a little.
- Salad oilThis ordinarily meant olive oil; cottonseed oil was also sold and blended as salad oil in the period, though it became widespread somewhat later. Use a mild olive oil or a neutral oil; a peppery modern extra-virgin will fight the mustard.
- The vinegar is aggressiveEqual parts vinegar and oil is far sharper than a modern palate expects, and period vinegars varied a good deal in strength, some weaker than today's standard five percent. Start with one tablespoon of vinegar, add oil, and bring the vinegar up to taste from there.
- Add the oil graduallyBeat it in a little at a time, as for mayonnaise. The yolks will take the oil up better this way and hold a thicker sauce; dumped in at once it is more likely to stay loose and separate on the plate.
- Catsup then and nowThe optional catsup in this period was as likely to be mushroom or walnut catsup as tomato, both thin, dark, salty and vinegary. Modern sweet tomato ketchup will make the sauce pink and sugary; a dash of Worcestershire is closer to the intended effect.
- Hard-cooked eggsTen minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives a firm yolk with no grey ring. The two leftover whites are worth chopping fine and stirring in for texture, which is what the related French sauces do.
- Yield and servingTwo yolks with the vinegar and oil make roughly half a cup, enough for two to four servings of fish. Serve it cold or barely at room temperature alongside poached cod, halibut or salmon; do not heat it, as the emulsion will break.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named local women, sold to raise money for the Home for the Friendless, and its individual attributions like Miss Hattie Buck's are the whole character of the book. The sauce itself belongs to a large nineteenth-century family of cold dressings built on hard-cooked yolks rather than raw ones, the same principle behind French sauce gribiche and the "boiled dressing" that was widespread in American cookery before jarred mayonnaise arrived; cooked yolks emulsify less powerfully than raw, and their better keeping in a kitchen without refrigeration is sometimes offered as a reason for preferring them, though the point is hard to document. Pairing a sharp mustard-and-vinegar sauce with plain boiled fish is older still and thoroughly English, the logic being that lean poached whitefish needs both fat and acid supplied at the table. The optional catsup is a useful period marker: in the 1870s that word still covered mushroom and walnut versions as readily as tomato.