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Buttered Eggs with Tomatoes
Cut tomatoes in one-third inch slices. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and sauté in butter. Serve a buttered egg on each slice of tomato.
A three-sentence recipe that assumes you already know the book's method for buttered eggs a few pages earlier. The tomato is the part that needs attention.
- What "buttered eggs" meansPeriod cookbooks use the term for eggs cooked gently in plenty of butter; the method is given elsewhere in the book, not here, and "buttered eggs" is applied both to whole eggs cooked soft in butter and to eggs stirred soft (scrambled). Either way, keep the heat low: butter over medium-high will brown and the white will turn leathery before the yolk warms.
- Choose firm tomatoesSlices a third of an inch thick need to survive dredging and turning. Use tomatoes that are ripe but firm, or slightly underripe ones; a soft summer heirloom collapses in the pan. Firm green tomatoes will also hold up, though the recipe does not call for them.
- Dry before dredgingSalt the cut slices, let them stand a few minutes, then blot the surface before flouring. Flour applied to a wet slice turns to paste and slides off in the butter instead of forming a crust.
- Pan and fatButter alone scorches at the heat needed to brown flour. Either clarify it, or add a spoonful of neutral oil, or wipe the pan and add fresh butter between batches. Cook the slices in a single layer without crowding — roughly two minutes a side.
- Timing the two elementsThe tomatoes hold heat better than the eggs do. Sauté the slices first, keep them warm on the serving plates, and cook the eggs last so they arrive still soft.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. Count one or two eggs and a matching slice per person; a medium tomato gives several usable slices at this thickness, so two or three tomatoes and about six eggs would cover a breakfast for four.
- Seasoning at the tableSeason the eggs separately; the salt and pepper in the recipe go on the tomato only. A little more pepper at serving would not go amiss.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book devotes an unusually long chapter to eggs, and much of it works like this one: a base method stated once, then a run of short variations that assume you have read it. Buttered eggs, shirred eggs, eggs in a nest and eggs with tomato all appear in close succession. The tomato-and-egg pairing belongs to the American breakfast and luncheon table of the 1890s and 1900s, when tomatoes were being sautéed, stewed, scalloped and stuffed in every direction; fried tomato slices with a starch coating were a standard side dish, and setting an egg on top turned a side into a course. The recipe also reflects the school's practical bent — an economical, quickly assembled dish.