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Craigie Toast
3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 4 eggs 4 tomatoes Salt and pepper to taste 1/2 cupful milk Toast 1 teaspoonful chopped gherkin or capers Skin, seed and chop tomatoes, add eggs well beaten, gherkin, milk, salt and pepper. Melt Crisco, add other ingredients and stir over fire till thoroughly hot. Serve at once on toast. The mixture may also be baked in oven twenty minutes and then garnished with small pieces of toast. Sufficient for four pieces of toast.
A savoury scramble of egg and tomato, meant for a light supper or breakfast dish rather than anything resembling a cake. It comes together in minutes and the only real risk is overcooking.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated more than once since this book was written. Three tablespoons of butter gives a better flavour here and behaves the same way in the pan.
- Skinning the tomatoesScore a cross in the base, drop into boiling water for 20-30 seconds, then into cold; the skins slip off. Four medium tomatoes is roughly 1 lb.
- Drain the pulpTomatoes carry a lot of water, and with half a cup of milk added the mixture can go soupy. Chop the seeded flesh and let it drain in a sieve for a few minutes before it goes in.
- "Stir over fire till thoroughly hot"This is the hinge. Use a low heat and pull the pan off while the curds are still glossy and loose — they carry on setting on the plate. Cooked until stiff, the eggs weep and the dish turns watery on the toast.
- The baked versionThe recipe gives no oven temperature, only twenty minutes. Around 350F is a reasonable reading; use a shallow buttered dish and check at fifteen; it should be just set with a faint wobble at the centre.
- Gherkin or capersA teaspoon sounds like a garnish but it is doing the work of the seasoning — acid and salt against the sweet tomato. Rinse salt-packed capers first; brined ones can go in as they are.
- YieldFour pieces of toast, so two people at breakfast or four as part of a larger spread. Toast the bread last so it is still crisp when the eggs go on.
A Calendar of Dinners was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to persuade American cooks that Crisco, a hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced in 1911, could replace butter and lard in everything from pastry to a pan of scrambled eggs -- which is why the fat is named first in the ingredient list here and recurs throughout the book. Craigie Toast belongs to the large family of Victorian and Edwardian "savouries" and hot toast dishes -- anchovy toast, Scotch woodcock, buck rarebit -- that filled the breakfast, supper and after-dinner slots in English and American households alike. The name is generally taken to be a place or family name attached to the dish by a cook or a cookbook writer, as with Melba toast; no firm origin is documented.