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Chopped Egg Sauce
Prepare White sauce and add one chopped, hard-boiled egg, a little minced parsley and a few drops onion juice, if desired.
A two-minute finishing sauce that assumes you already know the base. Everything depends on the white sauce beneath it.
- The white sauce it assumesA standard period white sauce is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until the flour loses its raw taste. For a sauce meant to coat fish or toast, keep it on the thicker side; for spooning over vegetables, thin it with a little more milk.
- Cook the roux before the milk goes inThe hinge of the whole thing. Let the butter and flour bubble together a full two minutes over low heat before adding liquid, or the sauce tastes of paste no matter how long it simmers afterward.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve. A few drops means a few drops; it is there for background, not for onion flavour. A pinch of onion powder is the modern shortcut.
- Add the egg off the heatChop the hard-boiled egg fairly coarse and stir it in after the sauce comes off the burner. Kept over heat the pieces break up and muddy the sauce.
- Season at the endThe original gives no salt or pepper; the seasoning would have been carried by the white sauce recipe it refers back to. Taste and salt after the egg goes in, and use white pepper if the appearance matters.
- Yield and what to put it onMade with a cup of white sauce it gives a little over a cup, enough for about four modest servings. It belongs on poached or baked white fish, boiled asparagus, cauliflower, or toast points as a luncheon dish in its own right.
- Making it aheadIt thickens hard on standing and the egg firms up. Reheat gently with a splash of milk, whisking, rather than at a simmer.
Egg sauce is one of a family of white-sauce variations that filled the middle pages of American and English cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward: the same butter-flour-milk base turned into parsley sauce, caper sauce, oyster sauce, cheese sauce, egg sauce, depending on what needed using. The plain milk-and-flour sauce is generally understood as a domesticated relative of the French bechamel, stripped of its infused aromatics. Egg sauce in particular is traditionally associated with boiled salt cod and with poached fish generally, and it suits a meal that was expected to be light, made partly of things already in the larder, and produced without much fuss. A cooked egg and a cup of white sauce were exactly that.