Home › The Principles of Cookery › Eggs, Sunshiny
Eggs, Sunshiny
Melt a little butter in an omelet-pan, sprinkle salt upon it, and break into it one or more eggs according to the number required. Fry these over the fire for about two minutes till they are sufficiently cooked, and be careful to turn up the edges to keep them from spreading too far. Before sending them to table sprinkle pepper over them, and cover them with tomato sauce. This dish is named by Italians eggs in purgatory. Eggs prepared in the same way, and sprinkled over with grated Parmesan or Gruyere cheese, are named eggs in moonshine.
A two-minute fried egg finished with tomato sauce, given here under three names. The only real technique is heat control.
- Pan and heatAn "omelet-pan" is a shallow, sloping-sided frying pan, ideally 8 inches for one or two eggs. Medium-low heat: two minutes at a hard sizzle will set the white into leather before the yolk warms through.
- Turning up the edgesThis is the hinge of the recipe. Nudge the spreading white back toward the yolk with a spoon or spatula in the first thirty seconds so it sets thick rather than lacy and thin. A lid for the last minute sets the top without flipping.
- Salt in the butterSalting the pan before the egg goes in seasons the white evenly, but keep it light — the tomato sauce and Parmesan both bring their own salt.
- The tomato sauceCassell's assumes a made-in-advance cooked sauce, not raw tomato. Warm it before it meets the eggs; cold sauce over hot eggs kills the dish. Modern versions of uova in purgatorio usually cook the eggs directly in a pan of simmering sauce, which is a fair reading of the same idea.
- DonenessTwo minutes gives a set white and a runny yolk, which is the intent. If runny yolks are a concern for anyone at the table, cover and cook until the yolk is firm throughout.
- YieldTwo eggs per person as a light supper or breakfast, with bread to mop the sauce. The sauce quantity is unstated; allow about 1/3 cup per serving.
Uova in purgatorio — eggs in purgatory — is a southern Italian, commonly Neapolitan, dish of eggs cooked in tomato sauce; the name is traditionally explained as the souls of the eggs suffering in the red flames of the sauce, though that explanation is folk tradition rather than documented. Its appearance in a late-Victorian English dictionary of cookery reflects the drift of Italian home cooking into British books through the second half of the nineteenth century, and "sunshiny eggs" may be a domesticated name of that kind. The variant with grated cheese, called here eggs in moonshine, is a looser attribution: "eggs in moonshine" appears as a name in earlier English cookery, though for dishes not obviously identical to this one, and why the two names sit together in a single entry is not recorded.