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Komac Stew
4 TABLESPOONS BUTTER I CUP SLICED ONIONS I GREEN PEPPER, DICED I CUP TOMATOES 1/2 TEASPOON SALT PEPPER 3 EGGS TOAST OR CRACKERS Heat butter and slowly fry onions and green pepper until tender. Add tomatoes and seasonings, and simmer. Break eggs into mixture and stir until eggs thicken. Take up at once on toast or crackers.
A camp skillet dish of stewed vegetables finished with eggs, close kin to piperade and Spanish eggs. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes and lives or dies on how the eggs are handled at the end.
- The hinge: pull it earlyEggs stirred into hot tomato go from creamy to grainy in well under a minute. Take the pan off the heat while the mixture still looks slightly loose; carryover heat finishes it, and "take up at once" is meant literally.
- Tomatoes"1 cup tomatoes" could be canned tomatoes with their juice or fresh; the recipe does not say. If using fresh, peel and seed them or the skins curl into the eggs.
- Simmer it downNo time is given for the simmer. Cook until the tomato has lost its raw edge and the mixture is thick rather than soupy, about 8 to 10 minutes, or the eggs will thin into a watery mess.
- Green pepperA green pepper here is an unripe bell pepper. One medium pepper diced gives about a cup, which is the right proportion here against a cup of onion.
- FatFour tablespoons of butter for this quantity is generous by current habit and will pool. Two is plenty in a nonstick or well-seasoned pan.
- Heat control on a fireOver coals rather than a burner, rake a portion aside and move the pan there before the eggs go in. Direct flame will scramble them hard before you can stir.
- YieldThree eggs and a cup each of vegetables serves two generously or three modestly, over two slices of toast apiece.
This belongs to a family of skillet dishes that turn a few eggs into a meal by stretching them with stewed vegetables: piperade in the Basque country, menemen in Turkey, shakshuka around the southern Mediterranean, and "Spanish eggs" or "eggs in tomato" in American cookbooks. The form needs one pan, tolerates canned tomatoes, and feeds more people than the egg count suggests. The origin of the name Komac is unrecorded.