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Scrambled Eggs with Chopped Tomatoes
3 tomatoes 2 tablespoons butter ⅛ teaspoon salt 3 eggs ½ t pepper Cut fine 3 tomatoes and cook for ten minutes, with butter, salt and pepper. Drop in unbeaten eggs, stirring constantly until eggs are set. Serve at once on toast.
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A three-ingredient luncheon dish that depends entirely on heat control. The seasoning as printed is almost certainly a typesetting slip and should not be followed literally.
- The pepper measurement"1½ t pepper" most likely abbreviates 1½ teaspoons, mirroring the salt line above it. Either way it is far more pepper than the dish wants. Read it as a pinch, or an eighth of a teaspoon, and adjust at the end.
- Salt, tooA teaspoon and a half of salt for three eggs and three tomatoes is heavy by modern palates. Start with half a teaspoon; tomatoes release liquid and the seasoning concentrates as it reduces.
- Cook the tomatoes down firstThe ten minutes is the hinge. Its purpose is to drive off water so the eggs set into the tomato rather than weeping into a pink puddle. Do not shorten it, and use a wide pan so evaporation actually happens.
- Peel or don'tThe recipe says nothing about skinning the tomatoes, though many period recipes for cooked tomato dishes do call for it; the skins curl into tough little rolls after ten minutes in butter. Blanch and slip them off, or accept the texture.
- Unbeaten eggsDropping them in whole and stirring gives streaks of set white against yellow rather than a uniform custard.
- Heat and timingOnce the eggs go in, drop the burner to medium-low and stir constantly. They need one to two minutes and should come off the heat while still glossy; carryover heat finishes them.
- YieldServes two as a light lunch, on two slices of hot buttered toast. Toast it while the tomatoes cook — the dish will not wait.
Tomatoes scrambled into eggs turn up in American community cookbooks of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often filed under luncheon or chafing-dish cookery, where a dish had to be quick, cheap and made from what the garden was producing in quantity. Serving it on toast suggests a light midday meal rather than breakfast — the toast soaks up the tomato liquor that even a well-reduced pan will throw. The advertisement wedged onto the end of the recipe is characteristic of fundraising cookbooks of the period: local merchants bought space and the sponsoring organisation sold the book. Ree Motor Sales evidently thought a page of scrambled eggs was as good a place as any to be remembered.