Egg Sauce
To a cup of drawn butter, add a hard boiled egg sliced or minced, and serve.
A two-line sauce that assumes you already know how to make drawn butter, which is the whole of the work. In American cookbooks of this period drawn butter is not clarified butter but a light flour-thickened butter sauce, closer to a plain white sauce made with water than to anything French.
- What drawn butter actually isA common nineteenth-century formula is roughly 2 tablespoons butter rubbed into 2 tablespoons flour, whisked into a cup of boiling water or light stock, simmered a few minutes, then finished with another lump or two of butter off the heat; proportions vary considerably from book to book. It should coat a spoon and taste of butter, not paste.
- The hinge: cook the flour, then stopSimmer the thickened base two or three minutes so the flour loses its raw taste, then pull it from the heat before beating in the finishing butter. Hard boiling after that butter goes in can make the sauce separate and turn greasy.
- A cup means eight ouncesA cup means the finished sauce, not the butter. Reckoned at roughly a modern eight fluid ounces, one cup will serve about four as an accompaniment; double it if it is going over a whole poached fish or a platter of boiled fowl.
- The eggThe recipe gives one hard-boiled egg to the cup, though other period versions use two or three. Sliced looks better over fish, minced distributes better over game or vegetables. Add it at the last moment so it warms through without breaking up into cloudy shreds.
- Season itThe original assumes salt and pepper are understood. Season the base before the egg goes in, and a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of chopped parsley is entirely in period and keeps the sauce from tasting flat.
- Holding itDrawn butter sets and skins as it cools. Keep it over hot, not boiling, water and stir before serving; if it stiffens, loosen with a spoonful of hot water rather than reheating hard.
Egg sauce is one of the plain English-derived sauces that crossed into American kitchens and stayed there long after fashionable cooking had turned to French bases: it appears through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a standard partner for boiled fowl and for salt fish. Drawn butter itself was a workhorse sauce of the American table, and the word "drawn" is generally traced to the older sense of drawing out or melting the butter, though by the time of books like this one it had come to mean the flour-thickened version rather than plain melted butter. The recipe's brevity is itself a period signal: the compiler evidently expected any cook using the book to have drawn butter by heart, so only the variation needed writing down.