Spanish Eggs
1 tablespoon olive oil 2 slices onion 1 tablespoon olive oi 2 cups mushrooms 1 cup cooked tomatoes 2 tablespoons tongue Dash of red pepper 1 saltspoon salt 3 eggs Cook the onion in the oil until light brown; add the mushrooms, tomatoes, seasoning and tongue, minced fine. Last of all, add the eggs, unbeater. As soon as the eggs are set the mixture is ready to serve. •
A quick skillet dish of eggs dropped whole into a mushroom-tomato base. The loose-leaf typesetting has swallowed a line: onion appears in the method but not the list, and two words are mangled.
- The missing onionThe ingredient list skips it, but the first instruction cooks it. One medium onion, sliced or chopped, matches the volume of the other ingredients.
- Typos to read through"Olive oi" is olive oil; "unbeater" is unbeaten. The eggs go in whole, not scrambled, so the yolks stay distinct in the sauce.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Season again at the end, since tongue is already salty.
- TongueTwo tablespoons of cooked tongue, minced fine; beef tongue, boiled and commonly cured, is the likeliest sort. Minced ham or prosciutto substitutes in equal amount. It is a seasoning here, not a main component.
- MushroomsTwo cups sliced is roughly 5 oz. Cook them until their liquid has released and boiled off before the tomatoes go in, or the finished dish will be watery.
- Cooked tomatoesAt this period, stewed tomatoes, either home-cooked or out of a can, drained of the thinnest juice. A cup of canned diced tomatoes works directly.
- Setting the eggsMake three hollows in the simmering mixture, slide an egg into each, cover, and hold over low heat for 3 to 5 minutes. "As soon as the eggs are set" means whites firm and yolks still soft; carried further they turn chalky.
- YieldThree eggs feeds two at breakfast or one as a light supper. Scale by the egg, with bread to catch the sauce.
Dishes of eggs poached in a spiced tomato base run through Spanish and North African cooking — huevos a la flamenca, shakshuka — and American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries applied the label "Spanish" fairly loosely to almost anything containing tomatoes, onions and red pepper. The tongue is the more period detail: cured tongue was an ordinary larder item in households that bought or boiled a whole one, and cookbooks of this era are full of small ways to use up the last of it, minced into hash, sandwiches, or a pan of eggs. Mrs. Fryer's book was issued in loose-leaf form so that pages could be added, rearranged or replaced in a binder; somewhere along the way an occasional line of type — here the onion — went missing without anyone catching it.