Home › The Principles of Cookery › Eggs and Tomatoes
Eggs and Tomatoes
Cut three large ripe tomatoes and two onions into slices, add two table-spoonfuls of chopped parsley, and pepper and salt to taste. Put these into a frying-pan with three ounces of butter, and allow them to cook gently for twenty minutes. Poach four eggs, lay them on hot buttered toast, and pour the mixture over them. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A simple stewed-tomato dish that hangs on the state of the tomato mixture: it should be thick enough to sit on the eggs, not run off the toast.
- Reduce properlyTwenty minutes over gentle heat is the minimum for three tomatoes and two onions to collapse and lose their water. If the pan still looks soupy, keep going uncovered until it mounds on a spoon.
- Butter quantityThree ounces is six tablespoons, generous by current taste for four servings. Two to three tablespoons carries the flavour without pooling on the toast.
- Onion firstSliced onion needs longer than tomato to soften. Give it a few minutes in the butter alone before the tomatoes go in, or you get sweet pulp studded with crunchy onion.
- Skins and seedsThe original slices the tomatoes unpeeled. Skins curl into tough strips as the flesh breaks down; peel them first if that bothers you, or press the finished mixture through a coarse sieve.
- Parsley timingTwo tablespoons of chopped parsley cooked for twenty minutes will taste of hay. Add half at the start and stir the rest in off the heat.
- PoachingThree minutes in barely simmering water with a splash of vinegar gives a set white and a soft yolk. Drain the eggs on a cloth before they meet the toast, or the bread goes limp under the tomato.
- Yield and costFour eggs, four rounds of toast, four servings as a light supper or breakfast. The "probable cost, 1s. 6d." is a Victorian household budgeting note and has no modern equivalent.
This is plain egg cookery of a kind found in late-nineteenth-century British books, where soft eggs set on a savoury stewed-tomato base and served on toast appear as tomatoes became cheaper and more familiar over the later decades of the century. It has something in common with French tomato dishes labelled à la portugaise and with the pepper-and-tomato dishes of Spain and the Basque country. The "probable cost" at the end is characteristic of the source, which gave a price for each dish.