Cook some rice in a rich chicken stock; place on a platter. Fry 6 eggs and trim neatly; sprinkle with salt, black pepper, chopped parsley and lemon-juice. Put the eggs on the rice and pour a little hot tomato-sauce over the base of the platter and serve.
March 25 — No. 25
Japanese
A one-pan supper dressed up with a national label. The recipe assumes you already know how to cook rice and fry an egg, so the only real decisions are seasoning and timing.
- Quantities and yieldSix eggs suggests three to six servings. Figure on about 1 1/2 cups raw long-grain rice cooked in 3 cups strong chicken stock, which gives a bed roughly the size of a large platter.
- "Rich chicken stock"This means a reduced, gelatinous homemade stock, not a cube in water. If using commercial low-sodium broth, reduce it by a third before cooking the rice and hold back the salt until you taste.
- Trim neatlyThe ragged skirt of white is cut away with a knife or a round cutter so each egg sits as a tidy disc. Purely cosmetic, but it is what makes the platter read as intended.
- Egg donenessThe recipe does not say. A softer yolk will sauce the rice, which suits the dish, but that is a choice the original leaves open.
- Lemon juice on fried eggsAdd it, along with the parsley, at the very last moment before serving, as the recipe implies by seasoning the eggs just before they go onto the rice.
- Tomato saucePoured around the base of the platter, not over the eggs. A plain smooth tomato sauce, thin enough to pool, served hot; a thick modern pasta sauce will sit in a lump.
- Assembly orderEverything must be ready at once. Rice on the platter, the seasoned eggs laid on the rice, then the hot sauce poured around the base.
The "dishes of all nations" books of this period often worked by attaching a country's name to a recipe on the strength of a single ingredient or a general impression, and this looks like an example: rice is the whole claim to being Japanese, while the fried eggs, parsley, lemon and tomato sauce belong to the Anglo-American and French hotel repertoire. Japanese cooking was little known in most Western households, and what circulated was largely secondhand. The dish is a cousin of other egg preparations built on a starch base with a sauce ringed around the platter. Read as a period document rather than as Japanese food, it is a record of how a cook stretched eggs and stock into something presentable.