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Baked Eggs and Tomatoes
One of the nicest ways of the myriad nice ways in which to cook eggs for breakfast is to select as many round, firm, ripe tomatoes as there are persons to be served. Wash them, cut a thin slice from the top of each for a cover, and scoop out sufficient space to admit an egg. Put in each a little butter, drop in the egg, taking care not to separate the white and yolk, season with salt and pepper, put a small piece of butter on each egg, and a little minced parsley on the butter. Replace the cover and bake about twenty minutes in a hot oven. Grated cheese may be used instead of the parsley.
A simple breakfast dish that depends almost entirely on the tomato holding its shape. Choose fruit that is firm and slightly underripe rather than fully soft.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in books of this period is usually glossed as somewhere around 400-425F. Twenty minutes at that heat will set the white, though the yolk may well come out firm rather than soft; check at fifteen if you want it looser.
- Choosing the tomatoesMedium beefsteak or large slicing tomatoes of about 6-8 oz hold an egg comfortably. Much smaller fruit may not take a whole egg, and very ripe fruit collapses in the oven.
- Hollowing outScoop with a teaspoon and leave a wall at least a quarter inch thick. Save the pulp for a sauce or soup rather than discarding it.
- Draining firstSalt the insides lightly and stand them upside down for ten minutes before filling. Tomatoes release a great deal of water, and without this step the eggs sit in liquid and the whites stay slack.
- Keeping them uprightCut a thin sliver off the base so each sits flat, or bake them in a muffin tin or in a dish where they support one another. A tomato that tips loses the egg.
- The egg itselfCrack each egg into a small cup and tip it in, which is the surest way to obey the instruction not to break the yolk. If the egg is too large for the cavity, hold back some of the white.
- The cheese variationGrated hard cheese in place of parsley works, but add it in the last five minutes with the lid off; twenty minutes under a tomato cap turns it greasy.
- YieldOne tomato per person as written. Served with buttered toast this is a light breakfast; two apiece makes a lunch dish.
Baking an egg inside a hollowed vegetable turns up in a number of late nineteenth-century breakfast dishes. The tomato had by then largely completed its long move from suspicion to staple in Anglo-American kitchens, and household compilations of the 1890s and 1900s offer many ways to use the summer glut. The same technique, under the French name oeufs en cocotte, is more usually done in a buttered ramekin, and the tomato simply supplies an edible one.