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Tomato Eggs
Hard-boil four eggs, cut in halves, and remove yolks. Fill with the following mixture: — Take sufficient grated cheese, raw tomato, butter and bread crumbs to make a rather stiff paste, with pepper and salt to taste. Serve cold.
A stuffed-egg recipe that swaps the usual mashed-yolk filling for a cheese and tomato paste, leaving the yolks free for another dish. It works, but the filling needs managing or it turns watery.
- Drain the tomatoRaw tomato pulp is mostly water and will slacken the paste within minutes of mixing. Seed the tomato, chop it fine, and let it drain in a sieve for ten minutes before working it in.
- "Rather stiff paste"The breadcrumbs are the control. Start with roughly equal volumes of grated hard cheese and drained tomato, a knob of softened butter, then add dry crumbs by the spoonful until the mixture holds a shape on a spoon.
- The cheeseA dry, sharp grating cheese — aged Cheddar, or a hard sheep's cheese — carries this best. Anything soft or fresh adds more moisture to a filling that already has too much.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs work better here than fresh soft ones, and not the coated commercial kind. Stale bread grated or pulsed dry gives the stiffness the paste needs. The recipe itself specifies only 'bread crumbs'.
- Hard-boilingTen to twelve minutes at a bare simmer for large eggs, then straight into cold water. Older eggs peel more cleanly than very fresh ones.
- The leftover yolksThe recipe discards the yolks, so plan a use for them the same day: a custard, mayonnaise or a sauce. Refrigerate them covered and use within a day.
- Assembly and yieldFill shortly before serving; the crumbs soften and the tomato weeps if the eggs sit stuffed for hours. Four eggs give eight halves, enough for four as a first course or part of a cold table.
Meatless cookery books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were written largely for Lenten and fast-day tables and for the growing vegetarian societies, and the egg does an enormous amount of work in them as the accepted protein of a flesh-free meal. Such books faced a real problem in a household with no waste allowance: a recipe that used one half of the egg had to be paired with something that used the other. Stuffed hard-boiled eggs themselves are much older than the genre — filled egg halves appear in European cookery well before the modern deviled egg — and the substitution here of cheese, tomato and crumbs for the customary mashed yolk is exactly the kind of small reallocation these books were built on. The raw tomato is worth noting: it is often said to have shed its earlier reputation for unwholesomeness in Britain and America by around this period, and it turns up freely in cold dishes and salads.