Home › Eggs › Eggs with Tomatoes
Eggs with Tomatoes
For 6 medium-sized tomatoes allow 4 eggs. Select smooth, firm tomatoes, cut them in halves, across, and remove some of the pulp. Bake them in a buttered pan. Beat the eggs, add a tablespoonful of rich cream, salt and pepper. Mix with the tomato pulp, put it in a saucepan with a tablespoonful of butter, and cook until it thickens, stirring all the time. As soon as the tomatoes are done lift them with a pancake-turner to rounds of buttered toast, fill with the hot mixture, and serve garnished with parsley or cress. This makes a hearty breakfast or luncheon dish.
A simple baked-tomato-and-scrambled-egg dish from the era when compiled household libraries were assembling breakfast cookery for middle-class kitchens. The original assumes you know how to handle both parts; the notes below fill in the numbers it leaves out.
- The hinge: drain the pulpScooped tomato pulp is mostly water, and stirred straight into beaten egg it will thin the mixture so far that it weeps instead of thickening. Chop the pulp and cook it down in the butter until most of the liquid has gone, then add the eggs.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. A moderate oven, 350F, for 15 to 20 minutes will soften the halves without collapsing them. Salt the cut surfaces and set them cut side up in the buttered pan.
- Egg timingCook the egg mixture over low heat and pull it off while it still looks slightly underset -- it carries on cooking in the pan and again in the hot tomato shells. Period recipes often take scrambled eggs further than modern taste wants.
- "Rich cream"In period books this meant the thickest skimmings rather than any standardised grade, and fat content varied widely. Heavy or whipping cream is the nearest modern equivalent; a tablespoonful for four eggs is a small enrichment, not a custard.
- YieldSix tomatoes give twelve halves, and four eggs plus the pulp make a modest filling for all of them. Reckon it as four servings of three halves, or increase to six eggs if you want the shells generously filled.
- Toast roundsCut rounds slightly wider than the tomato halves with a biscuit cutter, butter them, and have them ready before the eggs go into the pan. The toast is structural here -- it absorbs the juice the tomatoes release.
- CressThe garnish called for is garden or watercress, both peppery. Either still works; flat-leaf parsley is the plainer option.
Baked or stuffed tomatoes filled with egg belong to a wave of tomato cookery in American and British household books in the later nineteenth century, by which time the fruit was an established summer staple. Books of this kind leaned heavily on breakfast and luncheon dishes that could be made from a garden glut and a few eggs, and that looked composed enough to serve to visitors. The pancake-turner named in the instructions is a small period detail worth noticing. Serving such dishes on buttered toast rounds was a common presentation of the day, used for creamed chicken, mushrooms and sweetbreads alike.