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Scalloped Eggs and Ham
4 hard-cooked eggs cup or 1 cup cold chopped ham or meat 1½ cups buttered hard crumbs 1 pint white sauce Chop the eggs, and follow the rule, alternating the eggs and meat, or add chopped eggs and meat to the sauce.
A scallop in this book is an assembly, not a formula: layers of solids, sauce and buttered crumbs baked until bubbling. The instruction "follow the rule" points back to the book's general scalloping method, which the page assumes you already have in hand.
- What "the rule" isThe page sends you back to the book's general scalloping method, which is not reprinted here. In practice it means a buttered shallow dish layered with sauce, chopped egg and ham, alternating as the text says, and finished with the buttered crumbs on top; the recipe itself specifies neither oven temperature nor time, so bake in a moderate oven until the sauce bubbles at the edges and the crumbs have browned.
- How much hamThe ham line offers a range: anywhere from half a cup up to a full cup of cold chopped ham or other cooked meat. Use the larger amount for a more substantial dish.
- The second set of figuresThe trailing "6 eggs, 1 1/2 cups white sauce II" reads as an alternate proportion rather than an addition to the first list. Use one set or the other: 4 eggs with a pint of sauce, or 6 eggs with 1 1/2 cups of the book's White Sauce II, whose consistency you will have to check on page 29.
- A pint of white sauceTwo cups. The page does not say which grade of sauce; a medium one (about 2 tablespoons each butter and flour per cup of milk, so 4 and 4 for a pint) holds the layers. Anything much thinner will flood the dish and soak the crumbs from below.
- Buttered hard crumbsDry bread crumbs, not soft fresh ones, tossed with about 3 tablespoons melted butter until each crumb is coated. Unbuttered crumbs scorch in patches instead of browning evenly.
- Season it properlyThis is the hinge. Eggs, milk sauce and crumbs are all bland, and the ham is the only assertive element. Salt, white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg or a little dry mustard in the sauce is what separates the dish from wallpaper paste.
- Hard-cooked eggsBring to a bare simmer, hold 10 to 12 minutes, then cool in cold water. Boiled hard far longer, the yolks turn chalky and green-rimmed and crumble rather than chopping cleanly.
- YieldFour servings as a main dish with bread and a vegetable; six if it follows soup.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was given away by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to its policyholders, one of a great many free booklets that companies used in the early twentieth century to put their name in the kitchen. Such booklets tended toward brevity and economy, often with a nutritional streak drawn from the household-science movement. The period saw a new confidence that eggs, cheese, beans and milk could stand in for the daily chop or steak at a fraction of the cost, an argument often said to have been pressed particularly hard during and after the First World War food conservation campaigns. Scalloped dishes suited that agenda well, since a cup of chopped ham and a white sauce could carry a family dinner. The terse cross-references to a general rule and a numbered white sauce are typical of these booklets, which taught a handful of base methods and then varied them across dozens of pages.