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Tomatoes and Eggs
Hard-boil some eggs and, while they are cooking, fry a large square slice of bread in butter to make a large crouton. Peel the eggs when they have been in boiling water for ten minutes. Pile them on the crouton, and have ready a tomato sauce to pour over. Tomato Sauce: Gently stew two pounds of tomatoes and pass them through a sieve, return them to the pan and stir in a mustard-spoonful of mustard, a teaspoonful of vinegar, salt and pepper; heat well; and, if too thin, thicken it with flour to the right consistency.
A supper dish of three parts, none of them difficult: fried bread, hard-boiled eggs, and a sharp tomato purée. The only thing that will spoil it is a sauce that tastes raw or pasty, so give the tomatoes time and add flour with care.
- Mustard-spoonfulThe mustard spoon was the small round-bowled spoon sold with cruet sets, somewhere between a quarter and a half teaspoon. It most likely means dry mustard powder here; if you use prepared mustard, start with half a teaspoon and taste.
- The eggsTen minutes in already-boiling water gives a firm but not chalky yolk for medium eggs; large eggs want eleven or twelve. Drop them into cold water before peeling, which the original omits and which makes the shells come away cleanly.
- Cut them, don't pile themWhole eggs roll off a crouton. Halve or quarter them lengthwise and arrange cut side up so the sauce catches in the hollows.
- The croutonHere a crouton is a single thick slab of bread, about half an inch, fried in butter until crisp on both sides. Count one slice per person and fry over moderate heat so the butter browns rather than burns.
- Stewing the tomatoesTwo pounds of ripe tomatoes, stewed gently with no added water and sieved, gives roughly two to three cups of thin purée. Let it cook down before thickening; the sauce should coat a spoon, and reduction tastes better than flour.
- If you must thickenStirring dry flour into hot purée gives lumps and a raw taste. Work equal parts soft butter and flour into a paste, whisk it in a little at a time, and simmer two or three minutes so the flour cooks out.
- Out-of-season tomatoesA 28 oz tin of whole plum tomatoes stands in for the two pounds well; drain some of the juice before stewing so the sauce does not need thickening at all.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many eggs. Two or three eggs a head on one large crouton makes a light supper for two, or spread the eggs over four smaller slices with a green salad to serve four.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled during the First World War, when something like a quarter of a million Belgian refugees were living in Britain, and its recipes were gathered from those households. That context explains the shape of this dish. It is built from eggs, bread, butter and tomatoes, all of them cheap and none of them requiring an oven or a joint of meat, and it makes a full supper out of what an English cook of the period would have treated as a garnish. The book's value now is less in novelty than in preserving the plain weekday cooking of a displaced population, written down by people who had left their own kitchens behind.