Eggs: Sauce
Eggs in Tomato Sauce (Spanish recipe).
Cover the bottom of an earthen baking dish with well-seasoned tomato purée. Arrange on it poached eggs, leaving spaces to show the red color. Lay between the eggs small sausages, already cooked. Place a bit of butter on each egg and set the dish in the oven to heat.
Eggs with Bread Sauce. 1 cupful bread crumbs, 1½ cupfuls milk, ½ teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful onion juice, 6 eggs.
Put the bread crumbs in a saucepan, then add the milk, salt, a dash of cayenne, and the onion juice.
Simmer slowly till thick and smooth, beating several times with a spoon.
Two ways of setting eggs on a sauce, both written for cooks who already knew how to poach an egg. The second entry breaks off after the sauce is made — the six eggs are poached separately and laid on the finished bread sauce, as in the tomato version above it.
- Oven heatThe dish only needs warming through, not cooking. The recipe gives no temperature; a moderate modern oven, around 350F, for five to eight minutes should be enough, and longer will set the poached yolks hard.
- Earthen baking dishA glazed earthenware or stoneware gratin dish. Do not move one straight from a cold refrigerator to a hot oven, and do not set a hot one on a wet surface. A shallow ceramic or enamelled cast-iron dish behaves the same way.
- Tomato puréePeriod purée meant sieved cooked fresh tomatoes, closer to today's passata than to the concentrated tomato paste sold in tubes. Use about 1½ cups of passata reduced slightly and seasoned with salt, pepper and a little sugar if sharp.
- Small sausagesFor a Spanish reading, cooked chorizo or a fresh sausage cut into short lengths; chipolatas work. They must be fully cooked before they go in, since the oven stage is only a reheat.
- Onion juiceA standard nineteenth-century seasoning, made by grating a halved onion on a fine grater and using the liquid. A teaspoon is roughly what half a small onion gives. Grated onion pulp or a pinch of onion powder substitutes at a pinch.
- Bread crumbsSoft fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. Dried crumbs absorb far more liquid and will turn the 1½ cups of milk into paste; if that is all you have, start with a cup of milk and add more as it thickens.
- Simmering the sauceBread sauce catches easily. Keep the heat low, beat it smooth every couple of minutes, and pull it off when it mounds on the spoon — around ten minutes. A knob of butter beaten in at the end keeps it glossy.
- YieldThe bread sauce version serves three as a light supper or six as a first course, one egg apiece. The tomato version scales to whatever the dish holds; allow one or two eggs per person.
Eggs poached and set on a bed of tomato with sausage belong to a wide family of Mediterranean and North African dishes that later English-language cooks would recognise in huevos a la flamenca and its relatives; American household books of this period sometimes labelled such things simply "Spanish recipe," the tomato and paprika-red sausage being enough to earn the name. The bread sauce entry comes from the opposite direction entirely — bread thickened with milk and seasoned with onion is one of the older surviving English sauces, documented from the eighteenth century, and it clung on beside roast poultry into the twentieth. Setting the two side by side under "Eggs: Sauce" says a good deal about how compendia like Household Discoveries worked: recipes were filed by the part of the meal they solved rather than by where they came from, and a cook with six eggs and a saucepan was expected to take her pick.