Egg Sauce for Roast Chicken (1856)

From Modern American Cookery (1856):

Egg Sauce for Roast Chickens

Melt butter thick and fine, chop two or three hard boiled eggs fine, put them in a basin, pour the butter over them, and have good gravy in the dish. 

Lest this appear too easy (though it was), there's actually instructions for melting the butter:

To Melt Butter 

Mix a quarter of a pound of butter with a large teaspoonful of flour, place it in a saucepan with four tablespoonfuls of good milk, boil it quick, and shake it continually till the butter is melted.

Not a bad little sauce.

I basically did what the instructions said: I boiled 2 eggs, peeled them, and mashed up the yolks with a fork; then melted a stick of butter with a teaspoon of all-purpose flour in a saucepan (on medium), added 4 Tablespoons of milk, brought up to a boil; and finally poured the melted butter over the egg yolks. I omitted the gravy, as I didn't have any on hand, and I did take of the liberty of adding a dash of salt and back pepper (since without the salt, the sauce is incredibly insipid).

Re-reading, I'm not convinced that I should have used only the yellow yolks rather than the whole (though the texture might be a bit lumpier in that case).

The sauce mostly just tasted like butter. It reminded me of parsley-butter sauce (which I apparently never wrote up, so I'm linking this similar sauce), but with the advantage of not being seasonal. The sauce was pleasant enough over some chicken and mashed potatoes, and while it's certainly worth adding to my repertoire, it's not a show-stopper. It's fine for personal use, though I'll probably try work-shopping it a bit before serving it to others.