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Scrambled Eggs with Tomatoes
Have ready a pint of tomato pulp, from which the seeds have been removed, seasoned with onion, celery or parsley, and sweet herbs. Put a generous tablespoonful of butter into the blazer; add the tomato, and, when hot, six eggs, slightly beaten, half a teaspoonful of salt and half a saltspoonful of pepper. Stir until the contents are of a creamy consistency. Serve with brownbread toast.
Eggs and Mushrooms à la Dauphine.
INGREDIENTS.
1 pint of thick tomato sauce, highly seasoned.
1 pint of mushrooms. 1/2 a teaspoonful of salt. ½ a saltspoonful of pepper. 6 eggs.
Method. Cook the mushrooms in the tomato sauce until tender; add the seasoning and the
A chafing-dish supper dish that is essentially soft-scrambled eggs enriched with a seasoned tomato pulp. The text runs on into the beginning of the next recipe; ignore everything from "Eggs and Mushrooms à la Dauphine" onward.
- The hinge: low heat, constant motionScrambling six eggs into a pint of hot tomato is a thin, wet mixture that will curdle into watery lumps if it gets too hot. Work over the chafing dish's hot-water pan if you have one, or the lowest gas you can manage, and pull the pan off the heat while the eggs still look underdone.
- BlazerThe upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame or over a bain-marie of hot water. Any wide 10-inch skillet or sauté pan stands in for it.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "half a saltspoonful" is about an eighth of a teaspoon of pepper. That is a light hand by current taste; season again at the end.
- Tomato pulpA pint of seeded, drained pulp — fresh tomatoes peeled and pressed, or a 28-oz can of whole tomatoes seeded and drained well. Reduce it in the pan before the eggs go in if it is at all loose, or the finished dish will weep.
- "Seasoned with onion, celery or parsley, and sweet herbs"The wording most likely implies the pulp has already been simmered with these and strained, rather than raw aromatics stirred in, though the text does not say. Sweat a little minced onion and celery in the butter, add the pulp, cook it down, then finish with parsley off the heat.
- Creamy consistencyMeans large soft curds still glossy and just holding together, not dry. The eggs continue to set on the plate, and a chafing dish keeps cooking them at the table.
- Brown bread toastIn American usage of this period this generally meant a dense steamed or wholemeal loaf rather than commercial wheat bread. Any close-crumbed rye or wholemeal toast holds up better under the wet mixture than soft sandwich bread.
- YieldSix eggs and a pint of pulp serve three to four as a light supper or four to six as one course of a chafing-dish spread.
Chafing-dish cookery had its great vogue in American cities in the 1890s and 1900s, when a spirit-lamp dish on the sideboard let hosts cook at the table without servants — a favoured format for late suppers, bachelor rooms and college entertaining. The technique is the point: everything must cook quickly, in one shallow pan, in front of the guests. Eggs and tomatoes were natural chafing-dish material, needing only a few minutes and no oven, and the combination has parallels across the Mediterranean and Middle East, though the version here is milder and leans on the era's "sweet herbs" — the period phrase for thyme, marjoram, savory and the like — rather than on chile or garlic.