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Scrambled Eggs and Tomato
Melt two tablespoons butter; add one tablespoon each of chopped pepper and onion, one cup cooked tomato, one half teaspoon salt. When hot, add four eggs slightly beaten; when scrambled, serve on toast.
Poached Eggs on Toast May be prepared in chafing dish.
A chafing-dish supper dish from the era when the chafing dish was the fashionable way to cook at the table. It works on a stovetop skillet without changes, but a few of the original's assumptions need spelling out.
- Drain the tomato firstThis is the hinge. "One cup cooked tomato" means stewed or canned tomato, which carries a great deal of liquid; poured in as is, it thins the eggs into soup. Cook it down in the butter until the pan is nearly dry before the eggs go in.
- "Chopped pepper"Almost certainly a green bell pepper rather than chile or black pepper: it is chopped and measured by the tablespoon alongside the onion, which rules out ground pepper.
- Chafing dish heatA spirit lamp gives gentler, less directly focused heat than a modern burner. On gas or electric use medium-low and pull the pan off the heat while the eggs are still visibly soft.
- DonenessScrambled eggs are done when set but still glossy, around 160F. The residual heat of a chafing-dish blazer pan keeps cooking them at the table, so stop early.
- Water pan or notA chafing dish has two parts: the blazer, used directly over the flame, and the hot-water pan beneath it. Start the vegetables in the blazer over direct flame, then set the water pan under it once the eggs go in if you want insurance against overcooking.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt for four eggs plus a cup of tomato is a matter of taste; taste after the tomato has reduced, since reduction concentrates the seasoning already in the pan.
- YieldFour eggs serves two as a supper or light lunch, on two slices of toast each.
- The trailing line"Poached Eggs on Toast: May be prepared in chafing dish" is a separate short entry whose heading has run on into this one; it is not part of the scrambled egg method.
Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer; like other manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks of the period it ranged well beyond the sponsor's product into full household cookery. The chafing dish section reflects a genuine craze: from the 1890s into the 1910s the spirit-lamp chafing dish was the equipment of choice for late suppers, bachelor entertaining and college rooms, and dozens of books and pamphlets were devoted to it alone. Its appeal was that a hostess could cook in front of guests without a servant, which limited the repertoire to things done quickly in one shallow pan -- eggs, oysters, creamed foods, rarebits. Eggs scrambled with tomato, onion and green pepper is one branch of a very wide family that includes Spanish and Creole eggs in American books and piperade in the Basque country, all of them built on the same logic of stretching a few eggs with cooked vegetables.