Home › Chafing-Dish Cookery › Tomato Scramble
Tomato Scramble
1 tablespoon butter 4 eggs 4 tablespoons milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 saltspoon pepper 1 cup canned tomatoes Melt the butter; stir in the eggs, well beaten with the milk; add the tomatoes after they have been drained; season and cook until the eggs thicken.
A chafing-dish scramble that depends almost entirely on heat control and on getting the tomatoes dry enough not to water down the eggs.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is the small spoon from a Victorian salt cellar, roughly 1/4 teaspoon. So this calls for about 1/8 teaspoon pepper, which for four eggs is a light hand.
- Drain the tomatoes hardCanned tomatoes carry a great deal of packing liquid, and any of it left behind will keep the eggs loose and grey. Drain in a sieve, press gently, and chop the flesh before it goes in.
- The chafing dish is the pointHeat control -- The recipe names no vessel. If it comes from a chafing-dish chapter, a spirit lamp or hot-water pan would give gentle, indirect heat, which would account for the casual timing. In a skillet over gas or induction, work over medium-low and pull the pan off the burner while the eggs are still glossy.
- Order of operationsEggs beaten with milk go into the melted butter first, tomatoes after, exactly as the recipe directs. Combining acid tomatoes with raw egg and letting the mixture stand is best avoided.
- "Until the eggs thicken"Two to four minutes of gentle stirring, no more. Eggs continue to set from residual heat, and the tomato liquid that does remain will cook out into the curds if you push it further.
- YieldTwo servings as a supper dish, or four as part of a larger breakfast. If it is cooked in a shallow tabletop pan over a spirit lamp, doubling is unwise, as the heat is too mild for the extra volume.
Chafing-dish cookery had a long vogue in American households from the 1890s through the 1920s, when the tabletop pan and its spirit lamp were often said to be a standard wedding present and a whole genre of cookbooks was devoted to what could be made at the table without a kitchen. The appeal was social as much as culinary: a hostess could produce supper in front of guests, in a dining room or a bedsitter, without servants. Dishes in these chapters run heavily to eggs, cheese, oysters and creamed things, all of which cook quickly over low heat. The cup of canned tomatoes here is a marker of the period too, since commercially canned tomatoes were among the first canned goods to become cheap and reliably good, and they turn up in home cookbooks of this era as a year-round convenience rather than a compromise.