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Eggs a La Elizabeth
Put one dozen eggs on in cold water, after coming to a boil, let them boil fourteen minutes, then throw them in cold water; remove the shells; chop fine, add enough cream sauce to moisten; put in a buttered baking dish; sprinkle the top lightly with fine bread crumbs and bake in the oven seven minutes, or until a delicate brown.
A simple baked hard-boiled egg dish that assumes the cook already knows how to make a cream sauce and season it. Two things need attention: the boiling time and the missing quantities.
- Fourteen minutes is too longEggs boiled a full fourteen minutes develop a grey-green ring at the yolk and a sulfurous edge, the result of iron and sulfur reacting at length. Twelve minutes off the heat in covered water, or ten at a bare simmer, gives fully set yolks without the discoloration. The cold-water plunge the recipe calls for is exactly right and does help.
- Cream sauceThis means a plain béchamel: equal weights butter and flour cooked together, then whisked with milk or cream until it coats a spoon. The recipe says only "enough to moisten"; for a dozen chopped eggs that is likely to be somewhere around a pint of medium-thick sauce, added a little at a time so the mixture does not go soupy.
- No seasoning is givenThe recipe leaves the seasoning of the cream sauce to the cook, as many books of the period do; salt, white pepper and sometimes a grating of nutmeg are the usual choices. Chopped hard eggs are bland, so season the sauce well before it meets them.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Seven minutes is only long enough to colour the crumbs, which implies a fairly hot oven; in a moderate one the top will still be pale and the dish will simply need longer, watched until it takes the "delicate brown" the recipe asks for.
- Crumbs"Fine bread crumbs" here means dried crumbs from stale bread, not the coarse fresh kind. Tossing them with a little melted butter first guarantees the delicate brown the recipe wants.
- PeelingVery fresh eggs cling to their shells. Eggs a week or more old peel cleanly, which matters when you are shelling twelve of them.
- YieldA dozen eggs in sauce fills a shallow 9-inch dish and serves six to eight at breakfast, more if there is toast under it.
Chopped hard-boiled eggs bound in cream sauce and browned under crumbs was one of the workhorse breakfast and supper dishes of the late nineteenth-century American household, appearing under a dozen names — eggs au gratin, scalloped eggs, eggs à la crème — and here dressed up with a woman's name, which lent a plain dish the air of a French menu without any French technique beyond the béchamel. The dish belongs to a moment when eggs were cheap and plentiful in season, and the cream sauce was the standard vehicle for turning leftovers of any kind into a hot dish. Its usefulness was practical: the eggs can be boiled and shelled the night before, leaving only the chopping, the sauce, and a short spell in the oven between the cook and a served breakfast.