Home › Breakfast Dishes › Sun-Flower Eggs
Sun-Flower Eggs
Boil seven eggs twenty-one minutes. While the eggs are boiling, put half pint of milk to boil in farina kettle and toast three slices of bread. Rub two tablespoonfuls butter and one of cornstarch together smoothly; stir it into the boiling milk and cook until it is smooth and free from lumps; stir all the time. Slice the whites of the eggs in very small pieces; stir them into the milk. Have the toast well buttered and laid on a platter; also cut each piece into four squares. Pour over it the cream sauce well seasoned with white pepper and salt. Rub the yolks on a coarse grater and scatter on top of the whole and you will have an appetizing and pretty dish.
A creamed-egg toast dressed up with grated yolk to look like a sunflower. Almost everything works as written; the boiling time is the one thing to ignore.
- Twenty-one minutes is too longEggs held at a boil that long turn rubbery in the white and chalky in the yolk, with a green-grey ring at the boundary. Twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives firm yolks that still grate cleanly.
- Farina kettleA double boiler. Set a bowl or smaller pan over simmering water, or simply use a heavy saucepan over low heat and stir, since the milk here is thickened anyway.
- Half pint of milkOne cup. With two tablespoons of butter and one of cornstarch it makes a thick sauce; if it stiffens past pouring consistency, loosen it with a little more hot milk.
- Butter and cornstarch rubbed togetherThis is a raw paste stirred into hot liquid rather than a cooked roux. Add it in small pieces off the heat, whisk until dispersed, then return to the heat and cook two or three minutes to lose the starchy taste.
- SeasoningWhite pepper is the usual choice for a pale sauce, presumably so black flecks do not show. Salt the sauce firmly before it goes over the toast; the eggs bring none of their own.
- Grating the yolksCold yolks grate; warm ones smear. The recipe grates them straight from the pot, but chilling the hard-boiled eggs first helps, and the coarse side of a box grater gives crumbs rather than dust.
- YieldThree slices of toast cut into twelve squares serves three, or four at a table with other breakfast dishes. Assemble at the last minute or the toast goes limp under the sauce.
Creamed eggs on toast under one name or another fill the breakfast chapters of many American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s: hard-boiled eggs and a milk sauce were cheap, keepable ingredients that could be turned into something presentable before the family came down. The conceit here is purely visual, the white sliced fine into the sauce and the yolk grated over the top in yellow rays around pale squares of toast, which is where the sunflower comes from. Cornstarch rather than flour as the thickener is worth noting: corn starch had been sold boxed for domestic use since the middle of the nineteenth century and was marketed for sauces and puddings of this kind.