Tomato Toast
2 tomatoes 2 eggs 1 tablespoon butter 1/4 cup minced ham A slice of onion 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 6 rounds of buttered toast Skin the tomatoes and chop; mince the onion and mix with the meat and tomatoes. Cook them with the butter in a saucepan about ten minutes, remove from the fire, add the beaten eggs, stir over the fire until it sets, then serve on the toast.
A savory scramble bound with tomato, of the sort that filled the "entrees" chapter of American flour-company cookbooks when a hot dish had to be made from whatever was in the larder. It comes together in fifteen minutes and lives or dies on how long the eggs stay over the flame.
- The hinge: pull the eggs earlyAdd the beaten eggs off the heat, return the pan to low heat, and stir until the mixture is just thickened and still glossy. Tomato holds a great deal of water and heat; carried to the point where it looks fully set in the pan, it will weep and curdle by the time it reaches the toast.
- Cook the tomato down firstThe ten minutes with the butter is a reduction, not just a warm-through. Let the chopped tomato give up its liquid and the pan go from soupy to thick, or the eggs will never bind and the toast turns to pulp.
- Skinning the tomatoesScore the skins, thirty seconds in boiling water, then cold water; the skins slip off. Worth doing, since unpeeled skins roll up into tough curls in the finished scramble.
- "A slice of onion"Read this as about a tablespoon minced — one thin round off a medium onion. The book means seasoning, not a vegetable component.
- The hamCooked ham, minced fine — a scrap end or a thick slice from the deli counter. It is here for salt as much as for meat, so taste before adding the quarter teaspoon of salt, particularly with a country or city-cured ham.
- Butter and panOne tablespoon is modest for the volume of tomato. A nonstick or well-seasoned skillet helps, or add a second knob of butter with the eggs; the mixture catches easily once it thickens.
- YieldSix rounds of toast; the recipe gives no serving count, and two eggs with two tomatoes will stretch over them thinly, so read it as two or three portions at most. Have the toast buttered and waiting — the egg mixture will not hold.
Tomato toast belongs to the long American tradition of the "made dish" served on a slab of bread: creamed chipped beef, Welsh rarebit, mushrooms on toast, scrambled eggs stretched with whatever was at hand. Cookbooks issued by flour millers, of which the Gold Medal book is among the best known, were promotional publications given away or sold cheaply with the sack, and their entree chapters leaned toward exactly this kind of economy — a quarter cup of ham made to go round because bread and eggs did the rest of the work. Cooks had long bound a stewed vegetable with beaten egg to make it substantial, and the tomato, canned in enormous quantity by the late nineteenth century, slid neatly into the formula.