Category: Main Dishes

Creamed Eggs on Toast

I don’t remember when I first made creamed eggs on toast, but it was probably when we still living in Kentucky. We had bought Beard on Bread shortly after it was published in 1973, and the book got me interested in James Beard. He loved tarragon and, as I have mentioned elsewhere, he once said that “tarragon is the best friend a chicken ever had.”

I am sure that comment prompted me to try adding tarragon to béchemel sauce for creamed eggs. If tarragon was good for chicken, as I knew it was, it should be good for eggs too. And it is.

Béchemel sauce is one of the “mother” sauces in French cooking. Don’t let the name scare you. In English we call it a white sauce, and it’s a “mother” because it has many children, depending on what is added to it. For instance, many cream soups owe their velvety texture to a thin béchemel sauce. A medium sauce with Swiss cheese becomes sauce Mornay , and soufflés begin life as a thick béchemel sauce.

For creamed eggs, you make a medium white sauce flavored with tarragon, pepper, nutmeg and hot sauce. It is simple and delicious for breakfast or even a light lunch or supper.

INGREDIENTS:

4 large eggs
4 T butter
4 T all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. tarragon
1/4 tsp. white pepper
Dash of ground nutmeg
A few drops of hot sauce
2 cups milk plus a little more if needed
Toast

PROCEDURE:

Cover four large eggs with cold water in a saucepan. Boil the eggs for four minutes. Cover the pan, turn off the heat and allow the eggs to finish cooking in the hot water for eight minutes. Drain the hot water off the eggs and chill them in ice water for a minute. Peel the eggs and set them aside.

While you are peeling the eggs, melt the butter over low heat in a one and a half or two quart saucepan. Using a wooden spoon, stir the flour into the butter to make a smooth paste, which is called a roux. Add the salt, tarragon, pepper and nutmeg and continue cooking the roux for about four minutes, being careful not to brown it. The tarragon will color the roux an unappetizing gray-green, but don’t worry, everything will be okay.

While the flour is cooking heat the milk to steaming, either in a pan on the range or in your microwave. Stir the milk into the roux with a whisk or fork until you have a creamy white sauce. If it seems a little too thick, add a little more milk. Cook the sauce for five minutes.

Slice or chop the eggs and stir them into the sauce. Add a few drops of hot sauce, taste and adjust the seasoning.

Serve over toast.

NOTES: This recipe makes four generous servings.

Don’t even think of using oleo to make a roux. The sauce is better with whole milk, but one or two percent milk is okay. I have never tried skim milk.

Instead of peeling the eggs whole as for making deviled eggs, I often just cut the eggs in half and pop the egg out of the shell with a table knife. Just be careful not to include too much shell when you add the eggs to the sauce.

Easy Cube Steak and Mushrooms

Take some lean chewy beefsteak, pound it until it cries for mercy, simmer it slowly in a little wine and water until it gives up and falls to pieces and you will end up with one of the most wonderful simple main courses you will ever find. Mom had a wooden mallet with a waffled surface that she used to tenderize the cheap cuts of meat we grew up on. I can still see her slamming the mallet down on a defenseless piece of round steak.

We have a metal meat tenderizer today. It’s smaller than Mom’s but it does the job. However, as I have become older, wiser and lazier, I now buy cube steak, which is round steak that has been tenderized by a machine at the butcher shop. Starting with cube steak, you can put a meal on the table in well under an hour, even allowing a few minutes to peel the potatoes and catch your breath with a sip of the wine you use to help tenderize the beef.

INGREDIENTS:

1 to 1 1/2 lbs. cube steak
2 to 3 T vegetable oil
1 small carrot
1 small parsnip
1/4 cup grated onion
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. black pepper
1 3/4 cups water, divided
2 beef bouillon cubes
1/2 cup dry red wine
1 four oz. can mushrooms
2 T corn starch
1/4 cup cold water

PROCEDURE:

Mix the flour, salt and pepper together. Clean, peel and grate the onion, carrot and parsnip.

Put two tablespoons of oil into a covered skillet over moderate heat. Cut the cube steak into serving-size pieces and dredge them in the seasoned flour. Brown the meat and remove it from the skillet. Put the vegetables into the skillet and sauté them over moderate heat for five minutes. Add more oil if necessary.

While the vegetables are cooking, you will notice that the flour from the meat is continuing to darken. This will give a rich brown color to the sauce. Dissolve two beef bouillon cubes in 1 1/2 cups hot water.

Pour the water and wine into the skillet and use a wooden spoon to scrape the flour from the bottom of the pan. Return the meat to the skillet, cover and simmer for fifteen minutes.

Drain the mushrooms and add them to the skillet. Stir two tablespoons of corn starch into a quarter cup of cold water and stir it into the skillet. Simmer for five minutes to cook the starch and thicken the sauce. Taste and adjust the seasoning.

Serve with bread, boiled potatoes and a green salad. If you enjoy wine at dinner, pour a glass of the wine you used for the meat.

NOTES: Cabernet sauvignon, zinfandel or merlot are all good wine choices for this dish.

A pound of cube steak will give you three generous servings. A pound and half will serve four or five diners. You might want to use a medium carrot and parsnip and increase the amount of water, wine and flour slightly to give you more gravy if you use the larger amount of steak.

Many people have told me that they have never eaten parsnips, but it is almost certain that they have eaten sauces or stews that include this cousin of the carrot. Parsnips sweeten in the ground after a hard frost and are sometimes harvested when the top inch of soil is already frozen. They are so sweet that they were used as a source of sugar before cane and beet sugar became available. The Romans valued parsnips so much that the emperor Tiberius accepted parsnips as partial payment of tribute from Germany.

When you buy them in the market, they are usually dipped in wax to keep them from drying out. Peeling removes the wax and the outer skin of the parsnip. The parsnip, carrot and onion need to be finely grated and sautéd to flavor the sauce without calling attention to themselves.