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Eggs with Cucumber
1 tablespoonful Crisco 3 eggs 1 large cucumber 1/2 cupful stock 1 tablespoonful tomato pulp Salt and pepper to taste 1 cupful tomato sauce Peel cucumber, cut off ends and divide rest into two-inch pieces. Remove center portion of each with a cutter or small spoon. Place them in a Criscoed pan with stock; cover with greased paper and cook in oven till just tender. Great care must be taken so as not to break the shapes. Break eggs into saucepan, add Crisco and tomato pulp; season nicely and stir over fire until creamy and just set. Place cucumbers on hot platter and fill cavities with eggs. Cover with thick tomato sauce, and serve hot.
Sufficient for five pieces.
A Crisco-era vegetable-and-egg dish that works if you treat the two components separately: braise the cucumber barrels until barely tender, and pull the eggs off the heat while they still look underdone.
- The hinge: soft-scrambled eggsThree eggs with fat and tomato pulp set fast. Stir over low heat and stop while they are still glossy and slightly loose "just set" here means barely, since they carry on cooking in the hot cucumber shells and under the sauce.
- CriscoStill sold, though reformulated more than once since this book was written. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works; butter gives a better flavour with eggs, and the tablespoon stirred into the eggs is what makes them creamy.
- "Cook in oven till just tender"No temperature and no time are given. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading; start checking two-inch cucumber sections well before they soften through. Test with a skewer -- they should yield without collapsing.
- Greased paperButtered or oiled parchment laid directly on the cucumbers. It traps steam and keeps the tops from drying, doing the job of a modern lid or foil while still letting some liquid reduce.
- Hollowing the cucumbersAn apple corer or a small melon baller works better than a spoon. Leave a good quarter-inch wall; the seed core is the wettest part and comes out easily. Salting the hollowed pieces for ten minutes and blotting them draws off water that would otherwise thin the sauce.
- Stock and tomato pulpHalf a cup of stock is a braising liquid, not a sauce it should mostly cook away. Tomato pulp means fresh tomato flesh, seeds and skin removed, chopped fine; a tablespoon of drained passata or crushed canned tomato substitutes cleanly.
- Tomato sauceThe cupful of "thick tomato sauce" is a separate preparation, not given here and presumably taken as known. Any reduced, seasoned tomato sauce serves; it needs to be thick enough to coat rather than pool.
- YieldFive filled pieces two or three as a light lunch or supper dish, one apiece as a first course. It does not reheat well; the eggs tighten and the cucumber weeps.
This comes from a genre of cookbook that flourished in the 1910s and 1920s: the branded volume issued by a manufacturer, in this case Procter & Gamble, to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Crisco, introduced in 1911, was a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening pitched as a clean, all-purpose replacement for lard and butter, and the recipe books built around it reach for it in every position that fat can occupy -- greasing the pan, greasing the paper, enriching the eggs -- even where butter would have been the older cook's choice. The dish itself belongs to an older tradition of serving cooked cucumber as a hot vegetable, stuffed or stewed, which was common in British and French kitchens well before the salad cucumber came to dominate. The presentation -- neat cylinders filled and masked with sauce -- reads as a domesticated version of the restaurant plating of the period.