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Eggs a La Caracas
1 tablespoon butter 1/4 pound dried beef 1 tablespoon grated cheese 1 cup tomatoes Salt and pepper 4 eggs Onion-juice Melt the butter in a frying-pan and, when hot, add the dried beef and cheese. Toss lightly until the beef is slightly frizzled, add the tomatoes, the seasonings, and the eggs beaten until light. Stir and cook gently until of a creamy consistency.
A soft scramble built on chipped beef and tomato, in the style of the chafing-dish suppers this book was written for. The whole thing takes under ten minutes, and the only real risk is overcooking.
- Low heat is the hingeThe eggs go into a hot pan of beef and tomato, so drop the burner to low the moment they hit and keep stirring. "Creamy consistency" means pulling the pan off while the mixture still looks slightly loose; it will firm up in the residual heat.
- Dried beefThis is chipped or air-dried beef, sold in jars or thin-sliced packets. It is very salty. Slice or tear it into ribbons, and if the brand you find is aggressive, cover it with hot water for a minute and pat it dry before frizzling.
- Hold the saltBetween the beef and the cheese there is plenty already. Season at the end, after tasting, not with the tomatoes as written.
- TomatoesA cup of tomatoes in American cookbooks of this period usually means canned tomatoes with their juice, though stewed fresh tomatoes are also possible; a cup is a little over half a 14-oz tin. Break them up and let them cook down a minute or two before the eggs go in, or the dish turns watery.
- The cheeseA tablespoon of grated cheese is a seasoning, not a body. Any dry aged cheese works; Parmesan or a sharp Cheddar are reasonable stand-ins for the hard grating cheese the recipe assumes.
- Onion-juiceNo quantity is given. Grate half a small onion and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze it in your fist; a scant teaspoon of the juice is enough for four eggs. Grated onion pulp works if you do not mind the texture.
- PanNonstick or well-seasoned cast iron, and a rubber spatula. The tomato acid plus scrambled egg is the classic sticking combination.
- YieldServes two generously, three at a light supper, on toast or split biscuits.
Dried beef was one of the reliable shelf staples of the American pantry before home refrigeration, and dishes built on it — creamed chipped beef, beef frizzled in butter, scrambles like this one — turn up throughout early twentieth-century household cookery. The Delineator was a Butterick pattern magazine with a large domestic department, and its recipe collections lean heavily on quick suppers a cook could assemble from things already in the house. The name looks decorative rather than geographic: foreign place-names were often attached to egg dishes in magazines of the period, and nothing in the ingredients points to a Venezuelan origin.