Donald Brian
EGGS A LA ESPAGNOLE
Cook a clove of garlic finely chopped, and one-half a green pepper finely chopped, in two tablespoons olive oil, five minutes. Add five tomatoes cut in small pieces, eight sliced mushrooms and one-half cup cold, cooked meat, finely chopped. Cook five minutes, add four eggs slightly beaten and cook until the eggs are set. Bass ale to top it off.
A meal that I enjoy most of all and a very tasty dish after the play. Donan Celebrity
CASSEROLE HAM
1 slice of ham cut 1/4 inches thick (about 14 lbs.) 4 medium-sized potatoes Milk Parboil ham for ten or fifteen minutes. Remove bone and superfluous fat. Place ham in casserole, slice potatoes thin and place them on top of ham.
Pour over milk until it can be seen through top layer of pota- Cover and bake until potatoes. toes are done.
Yours truly,
A supper scramble built on a quick sofrito of garlic, pepper and tomato, with cooked meat and mushrooms folded in. The hinge is the last thirty seconds: the eggs go in barely beaten and want gentle heat, or the whole thing weeps.
- Pan and heatUse a 10-inch skillet, non-stick or well-seasoned, over medium. The vegetables should sizzle without browning; garlic scorched in the first five minutes will carry a bitter note all the way through.
- The tomatoesFive tomatoes, call it around 1 1/2 lb. They throw a great deal of water, so cook them until the pan looks glossy rather than soupy before the eggs go in, or drain briefly.
- Cold cooked meatThis is a leftovers dish: half a cup of chopped roast beef, ham, lamb or chicken. It is being warmed through, not cooked, so add it with the tomatoes and no earlier.
- Eggs setFour eggs into a hot vegetable base set fast. Pull the pan while they still look slightly underdone; residual heat finishes them. Cooked "until set" over high heat gives a dry, grainy scramble.
- Green pepperHalf a green bell pepper. Period recipes calling for "green pepper" generally mean the sweet kind rather than a hot one.
- YieldTwo generous late suppers, or four smaller servings with bread. Bass is a malty English pale ale and still made; any bitter or amber ale sits well against the tomato and garlic.
Eggs cooked into a base of tomato, sweet pepper, garlic and oil is one of the oldest useful ideas in Mediterranean cooking, surfacing as Basque piperade, Spanish pisto with eggs, and North African shakshuka. American cookbooks of the period attached the label "a la Espagnole" to a wide range of dishes containing tomato and pepper, so the name signals a flavour idea rather than a documented Spanish original. The context matters as much as the dish: Brian was a matinee idol of the Broadway operetta boom, and a performer coming off stage near midnight wanted something built from a few pantry vegetables and yesterday's roast, hot in fifteen minutes. Celebrity cookbooks of this kind are full of exactly this sort of after-theatre food.