Ernest Truex
EGG RUMBLE
1 teaspoon of butter 3 eggs 2 tablespoons milk or cream 6 sardines 1 tablespoon Worcestershire Sauce Put butter and milk-or cream-in frying pan, then break eggs into it. Break the yolks with a fork and scramble. When half done, add sardines, which have been skinned and cut fine. Mix well with the eggs, then add Worcestershire sauce.
Serve on hot toast and sprinkle with paprika.
Simply great!
Sincerely yours, Enest True Bangs
A savoury scramble of the type served at late suppers after the theatre. It comes together in under five minutes, so everything should be prepped before the pan goes on.
- Fat and pan heatA single teaspoon of butter for three eggs is a very small amount, though the milk or cream goes into the pan with it. In a modern nonstick pan it works; in stainless, use a tablespoon and keep the heat gentle so the eggs stay soft.
- The sardinesDrain the tin before using. "Skinned and cut fine" means chopped small so the fish disperses through the egg rather than staying in fillets; the soft spines of tinned sardines can be left in or removed as you prefer.
- Worcestershire is a lotA full tablespoon for three eggs will dominate and will also loosen the curd with extra liquid. Start with a teaspoon, stir it in off the heat, and add more to taste.
- Do not saltTinned sardines and Worcestershire between them carry all the salt the dish needs. Season with pepper only, then check at the end.
- "When half done"Add the fish while the eggs are still visibly wet and loose. Once they have set, folding in the sardines means overworking them, and the residual heat of the pan will finish the cooking after you take it off.
- Toast firstThe scramble waits for nothing. Have the toast made, buttered and hot on the plates before the eggs go into the pan.
- YieldThree eggs and six sardines make two modest portions on toast, or one substantial supper.
This comes from one of the celebrity cookbooks that collected recipes contributed by working stage actors, a genre in which the appeal was the signature at the bottom as much as the dish. Ernest Truex (1889-1973) was a small, quick, much-employed character actor who moved from Broadway into early film and later television, and the recipe he sent in is exactly the kind of thing a performer eats after the curtain: a hot savoury made from a tin and a few eggs at eleven at night. The dish itself belongs to the Anglo-American tradition of the "savoury" -- scrambled eggs enriched with anchovy, sardine or bloater paste on toast -- a supper and breakfast staple that spread further as tinned fish became cheap and widely available. "Egg Rumble" appears to be Truex's own name for it rather than a term of art; the garbled signature at the end ("Enest True Bangs") looks like a transcription or printing error rather than anything Truex wrote.