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Eggs in Tomatoes
4 eggs 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley 4 firm tomatoes I heaping tablespoonful (I Salt, pepper, and dust of papoz.) butter rika Wipe each tomato and cut a round piece from the stalk end. Remove enough pulp to leave room for one egg dropped carefully into each, first dusting the inside of the tomatoes with salt, pepper, and paprika. Put a small piece of butter on the top of each egg; place the tomatoes in small well-buttered fireproof dishes and bake until the whites of eggs are lightly set. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and parsley.
Serve hot.
A straightforward baked-egg dish whose only real difficulty is the tomato: it must hold its shape long enough for the egg to set. The ingredient list has come through the scanner badly garbled, but the quantities are recoverable — 4 eggs, 4 firm tomatoes, 1 teaspoon chopped parsley, 1 heaping tablespoon butter, and salt, pepper and paprika.
- The hinge: choose the tomato carefullyFirm, thick-walled, slightly underripe tomatoes hold up; a soft summer tomato collapses and floods the dish with juice before the white sets. Salting the hollowed shell and letting it drain upside down for ten minutes helps considerably.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none, which is common in recipes of this kind. Something in the region of 350F suits the dish: much hotter and the tomato is liable to slump before the egg firms, much cooler and the white may weep.
- "Fireproof dishes"Ramekins, small gratin dishes or a muffin tin. The point is to support the tomato upright and catch any juice, not to bake the eggs directly on a sheet.
- TimingReckon on roughly 15-25 minutes for whites lightly set with a soft yolk, longer for a firm yolk, judging by eye as the recipe directs. Carryover heat continues the cooking, so pull them a shade under.
- Sizing the cavityRemove pulp until the shell will just take a whole egg without overflowing; the recipe gives no egg size, so judge by the eggs in hand. Crack each egg into a cup first and slide it in, which reduces the risk of breaking the yolk over the tomato.
- PaprikaRead this as plain sweet paprika, used as much for colour as flavour. Smoked paprika, a later arrival, will dominate the dish; use the plain sweet kind.
- YieldFour tomatoes serve two as a light lunch or four as a first course. The reserved pulp is worth keeping for a sauce or soup rather than discarding.
Casserole cookery had a vogue in English and American kitchens either side of 1900, when heatproof earthenware made it possible to cook and serve in the same vessel — a saving of washing-up in households with fewer servants than their predecessors. Eggs baked in a hollowed vegetable belong to the same moment: they are cheap, meatless, need no sauce-making skill, and arrive at the table looking composed. Tomatoes had by then largely shed their old reputation for unwholesomeness and were a familiar summer garden crop, and dishes of this kind appear under various names in breakfast and luncheon chapters of the period. Hungarian paprika was also spreading through fashionable Anglo-American cooking around this time, and turns up in such books wherever a plain dish wanted colour.