Home › Recipes › Eggs in Tomatoes
Eggs in Tomatoes
Select tomatoes that are ripe but firm. Plunge them in boiling water for a moment and remove skins. Cut out hard stem ends making in each a hollow large enough to hold a broken egg. Into each of the hollows drop a fresh egg without breaking the yolk, season with butter, pepper and salt and bake in a moderate oven, until tomatoes are tender and eggs are set. Serve on rounds of buttered toast with a cream sauce.
A simple baked-egg dish whose only real difficulty is structural: a peeled tomato has nothing to hold it upright once it softens. Everything else is timing.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. At that heat a medium tomato with an egg in it needs roughly 20 to 25 minutes for the white to set with the yolk still soft; 30 minutes or more gives a firm yolk.
- Support the tomatoesSkinned tomatoes slump and split as they bake, and the egg runs out. Set each one in a muffin cup, a ramekin, or a tightly packed baking dish so the sides are held. This is the single instruction the original omits.
- Choosing the tomatoYou need one large enough to hold a whole egg after hollowing — about 3 inches across, 6 to 8 oz. Beefsteak or a large globe tomato works; Romas and small round tomatoes do not, and the egg will overflow.
- SkinningScore the skin, 15 to 20 seconds in boiling water, then straight into cold water. The original's "for a moment" is accurate; longer and the outer flesh cooks and turns to pulp.
- Salt and drain firstHollow the tomatoes, salt the insides lightly and invert them for 10 minutes. Tomato liquid released during baking thins the egg and makes the finished dish watery.
- Butter, pepper and saltAbout a teaspoon of butter per tomato, dotted on top rather than underneath the egg. Season after the egg goes in — salt directly on the yolk mottles it.
- The cream sauceNone is specified. A plain white sauce of the kind usually meant: 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 cup milk or thin cream, cooked out for two or three minutes and seasoned with salt and white pepper. Make it while the tomatoes bake.
- Yield and servingCount one tomato per person for a light lunch, two for a main course. Toast the bread rounds at the last minute; they go soggy quickly under a wet tomato and a sauce.
Baked eggs in a hollowed vegetable belong to a family of dishes common in American household cookery around the turn of the twentieth century, by which time the tomato was a well-established summer staple in northern kitchens. Dishes of this kind turned a garden glut and a few eggs into something that looked composed enough for a luncheon table. The cream sauce and the round of buttered toast are typical of the period's finishing style: many small savory dishes of the era were served on toast and masked with a white sauce, as were eggs, creamed chicken, sweetbreads and mushrooms alike.