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Belgian Eggs
Make some scrambled eggs, and place them on a very hot dish, and pour round them a thick to mato sauce. Decorate the dish quickly with thick rounds of tomato.
A three-line sketch rather than a recipe, of the kind that assumes the cook already knows how to scramble eggs and make a tomato sauce. The only real decisions are texture and temperature.
- QuantitiesNone are given. Figure two to three eggs per person, with about 2 tablespoons of tomato sauce and two or three tomato slices each; the dish serves as a light lunch or supper course.
- The hinge: soft eggsEverything depends on pulling the eggs while they are still glossy and slightly underset. They will carry on cooking on the "very hot dish" and in contact with the sauce, and firm eggs here turn watery and granular.
- "A very hot dish"A warmed serving platter, not a hot pan. Put the plate in a 200F oven for a few minutes while you cook; a cold plate chills the eggs and the sauce skins over.
- Thick tomato sauceThick is the operative word. A thin sauce will bleed into the eggs and grey them. Reduce a plain tomato sauce until it mounds on the spoon, and pour it in a ring around the eggs rather than over them.
- Tomato roundsCut them thick, as the original says, from firm, ripe tomatoes. The recipe does not say whether they are raw or cooked; raw is the simplest reading of a quick decoration. Salt them lightly and blot the cut faces so they do not weep onto the platter.
- Work fast"Decorate the dish quickly" is a genuine instruction, not a flourish. Have the sauce hot, the tomatoes cut and the plate warm before the eggs go into the pan.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in England in 1915 from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion; it is generally described as having been produced in aid of refugee relief. That context may explain the book's character: short, unfussy, domestic dishes remembered rather than transcribed from a professional kitchen, which may be why this one gives no quantities at all. Eggs with tomato in some form is common across the whole of Europe, and the name here may be doing patriotic work as much as culinary work — a plain plate of scrambled eggs claimed for a country that had, at the time of writing, largely been occupied. Tomatoes were by the 1910s an ordinary market vegetable in northern Europe, having been treated with suspicion there well into the nineteenth century.