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Eggs with Tomatoes
3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 4 even-sized tomatoes 8 rounds buttered toast 3 eggs 2 tablespoonfuls cream 1 tablespoonful chopped pimiento Salt and pepper to taste
This entry gives quantities only — the method that accompanied it in the book is not on this page. What the list describes is halved tomatoes fried in fat, topped with soft-scrambled eggs and pimiento, served on toast rounds.
- The missing methodNot on this page; from the ingredients alone the likely procedure is to halve the tomatoes, season them, and cook cut side down in the hot fat until browned and just tender, then scramble the eggs slowly with the cream and pimiento, spoon them over the tomatoes and set each on a round of toast.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the reason this book exists. Any neutral oil or butter works in the same quantity; butter will brown the tomatoes better but scorches faster.
- PimientoCanned sweet red peppers, skinned and packed in brine — still sold in jars near the olives. Drain and pat dry before chopping or the eggs will weep.
- Eggs and creamThree eggs to two tablespoons cream is a rich, loose scramble. Cook over low heat and pull the pan off while the curd still looks underdone; carryover heat finishes it.
- Tomato choice"Even-sized" presumably for uniform cooking and appearance. Firm, slightly underripe tomatoes hold their shape in the pan; very ripe summer fruit collapses into sauce.
- Toast roundsCut into rounds to match the tomato halves. Eight rounds and four tomatoes means one round per half — the toast is a base, not a side.
- YieldServes four as a light supper or breakfast dish, two if it is the whole meal.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as promotional literature for Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening the company brought to market in 1911. The recipes call for Crisco by name, often in places where a cook of the period would have reached for butter, lard or drippings — the book's real argument is that one tin of shortening can fry, bake and saut é across an entire year of menus. The dish itself belongs to a large family of early twentieth-century American egg-and-toast suppers, and the chopped pimiento is a period marker: canned Spanish sweet peppers are generally thought to have become cheap and widely available in the United States in the decades on either side of 1900, and cookbooks of the era scatter them through eggs, cheese dishes and salads wherever a spot of red was wanted.