Egg Sauce

This is a sauce for a cold, dark evening when you've been outside too long and the windows have gone black by five o'clock. It belongs to winter and to the months when smoked haddock looks better than anything else on the fishmonger's slab. It is not a clever sauce. It does not need to be.

A proper béchamel, made slowly with milk that has had a bay leaf in it, then chopped hard-boiled eggs folded through with parsley and nutmeg. That's the whole thing. The eggs make it homely in a way that pure white sauce never quite manages on its own. They give it body, texture, something to find with the spoon. It's the sauce my mother made for poached haddock and the sauce I still make now, and the recipe in the notebook hasn't changed in thirty years because there's nowhere left to improve it.

The traditional partner is smoked haddock, gently poached in milk until the flesh just flakes. Spoon the sauce over the top, scatter more parsley, and put a warm plate in front of someone. There are few better feelings. But it's just as good with a piece of plain white fish, or over a baked potato split open and steaming, or with leeks softened in butter. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract. Take it where you need it to go.

We're only making dinner. But on a January evening, this is exactly the sort of dinner that makes the rest of the day make sense.