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Eggs Poached in Tomatoes
Peel and cut into small pieces six medium sized tomatoes. Chop fine one small green onion. Put the onion and tomatoes in a stewing pan and stew slowly fifteen minutes, then add a teaspoonful of salt and a saltspoonful of pepper. Carefully break six eggs into the hot tomatoes, cook two minutes. Have ready slices of buttered toast. Lift the eggs carefully, one at a time, from the tomatoes, and place them on the toast, pour the tomatoes around them, and serve.
A one-pan summer supper that depends entirely on the tomatoes cooking down before the eggs go in. A few of the measurements and timings need translating.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is generally reckoned at a quarter of a teaspoon. Start with a generous pinch of pepper and adjust at the end.
- Stewing panAny wide, shallow saucepan or skillet with a lid. Width matters more than depth here: the six eggs need to sit in a single layer with room between them.
- Get the sauce thick firstFifteen minutes of slow stewing is the minimum, not a target. Peeled tomatoes throw a great deal of water, and if the sauce is still loose the eggs will drift and poach unevenly. Cook until a spoon drawn across the pan leaves a track.
- Two minutes is not enoughWhites need roughly 4 to 6 minutes in a barely simmering sauce, covered, to set while the yolks stay soft. Judge by sight rather than clock: the whites should be opaque all the way to the edge of the yolk.
- Peeling the tomatoesScore, dunk in boiling water 20 to 30 seconds, then into cold water and the skins slip off. Out of season, a 28 oz tin of whole peeled tomatoes, drained and chopped, is a fair substitute for six fresh ones.
- Green onionWhat the book calls a small green onion is a scallion, white and green parts both. A shallot works if you want something rounder.
- YieldSix eggs on six slices of toast serves three as a main course or six at breakfast. Butter the toast while the eggs finish so it does not go cold and leathery under the sauce.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to a small genre of late nineteenth-century American cookbooks written for the months when a coal range made the kitchen unbearable and heavy meat cookery seemed indigestible. The advice of the period was to eat lightly in summer, and eggs, tomatoes and toast answered that on every count: quick, cheap, cooked in one pan on one burner, and made from what the kitchen garden was producing in volume in August. Eggs cooked directly in a tomato sauce turn up independently all round the Mediterranean and North Africa, from Basque piperade to the dishes now widely known as shakshuka, and there is no reason to trace this American version to any of them; the combination suggests itself wherever tomatoes are plentiful. The instruction to lift the eggs out and pour the sauce around them, rather than serving straight from the pan, may be no more than practical: lifted eggs are not broken by the ladling.