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Eggs à la Caracas
2 ozs. smoked dried beef 1 cup tomatoes 1/4 cup grated cheese Few grains cinnamon Few grains cayenne 2 tablespoons butter 3 eggs Few drops onion juice Pick over beef and chop finely, add tomatoes, cheese, onion juice, cinnamon, and cayenne. Melt butter, add mixture, and when heated, add eggs well beaten. Cook until eggs are of creamy consistency, stirring and scraping from bottom of pan.
A chafing-dish scramble of chipped beef, tomato and cheese, closer to a savoury egg hash than to plain scrambled eggs. It stands or falls on heat control.
- The hinge: gentle heatEggs cooked with acidic tomato curdle and weep quickly. Keep the pan low, stir constantly, scrape the bottom, and pull it while it still looks slightly underdone — "creamy consistency" means barely set, not dry curds.
- Smoked dried beefThis is chipped or dried beef, sold in jars or thin packets, and it is extremely salty. Add no salt until you have tasted the finished eggs; the beef can be rinsed and blotted first if it seems very salty.
- 1 cup tomatoesIn period usage this most often meant canned tomatoes, drained of most of their liquid, though peeled fresh ones chopped would serve. Too much juice will thin the mixture and prevent the eggs from setting; reduce it in the pan before the eggs go in.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut: grate half an onion and squeeze, or press a wedge through a garlic press. The recipe asks only for a few drops, so an eighth of a teaspoon is enough. Grated onion flesh works but will not disappear into the eggs the way the juice does.
- Grated cheeseThe type is unspecified; a cheddar or a Gruyère both work. A quarter cup is roughly 1 oz.
- Cinnamon and cayenne"Few grains" is a pinch — an eighth of a teaspoon or less of each. The cinnamon is deliberate and characteristic; it should read as warmth behind the tomato, not as dessert spice.
- Without a chafing dishA heavy skillet or small saucepan over low heat does the same job. If you want the original's forgiving pace, use a bowl set over simmering water; it takes longer but will not scramble hard.
- YieldThree eggs feeds two as a light supper or lunch, or three if served on toast points or crackers.
The chafing-dish recipes of this period belong to a specific moment in American entertaining: the 1890s vogue for cooking at the table over a spirit lamp, which let hostesses and college students alike produce hot food without a kitchen or a servant. Such dishes lean on shelf-stable, ready-to-eat ingredients — dried beef, canned tomatoes, grated cheese, eggs — since a chafing dish suits warming, stirring and gentle cooking better than roasting. The name looks decorative rather than geographical; late-Victorian cookbooks often attached foreign place names to dishes with a hint of spice, and the pinch of cinnamon with cayenne may be the sort of gesture toward "Spanish" or Latin American flavour such titles signalled. Nothing in the recipe connects it to Caracas.