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Tomatoes with Eggs
Choose round tomatoes of about equal size and peel them. Cut off their tops, take out their insides, and drop a raw egg into each, replacing the top as cover. Put the tomatoes in a baking-dish and bake for about ten minutes, until the eggs are set. Serve up in the baking-dish very hot, with Bechamel sauce, or some brown gravy.
A one-line recipe that assumes more skill than it states. The whole thing turns on tomato size and on how long an egg actually takes to set inside a wet vegetable.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, is right here; hotter and the tomato walls collapse before the white sets.
- Ten minutes is optimisticA raw egg enclosed in a cold, wet tomato needs roughly 20-30 minutes at 350-375F for the white to set firm. Check at 20 and judge by the white, not the clock: the yolk should still be soft but the white opaque throughout.
- Choosing tomatoesLook for round, thick-walled tomatoes about 3 inches across, roughly 6-8 oz each. A large egg is about 3 tablespoons of volume, so the cavity must hold that with room for the lid. Beefsteak types work; thin-walled salad tomatoes slump.
- PeelingScore the base, 15 seconds in boiling water, then into cold, and the skin slips off. Peeled tomatoes are more fragile, so bake them in a dish that holds them upright and touching.
- Draining the shellsOnce hollowed, salt the insides lightly and invert them for ten minutes. The seeds and jelly you scoop out carry a lot of water, and any left behind thins the egg and floods the dish.
- The lidsThe cut tops are cover, not garnish. They trap steam and keep the egg surface from drying to leather; leave them on for the whole bake and serve them in place.
- The sauceBechamel here means the plain white sauce of milk, butter and flour, not a cheese sauce. Brown gravy would be a meat-stock gravy. The recipe says only to serve the tomatoes in their baking-dish, very hot, with one or the other.
- YieldOne tomato per person as a first course or light supper dish, two for a main. The dish does not reheat: the whites turn rubbery and the shells weep.
This comes from Simple Italian Cookery, published in 1912 under the pen name Antonia Isola, one of a number of early English-language books aimed at persuading American households that Italian food was more than macaroni. Its recipes are short to the point of curtness, assuming a cook who already knew what a set egg looked like. Baked or stuffed eggs and tomatoes appear in various forms in Italian cooking, where the tomato is treated as a container as readily as a sauce. The finish is worth noting: bechamel or brown gravy points to the Anglo-American table the book was written for, though bechamel (balsamella) was long naturalised in Italian cooking too.