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Scrambled Eggs with Tomato Sauce
6 eggs 1¾ cups tomatoes 2 teaspoons sugar 4 tablespoons butter 1 slice onion ½ teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Simmer tomatoes and sugar five minutes; fry butter and onion three minutes; remove onion, and add tomatoes, seasonings, and eggs slightly beaten. Cook same as Scrambled Eggs. Serve with entire wheat bread or brown bread toast.
A soft scramble enriched with a quick stovetop tomato sauce, from the era when canned tomatoes were the standard winter vegetable. The whole thing takes under fifteen minutes, and the only difficulty is keeping the eggs tender once wet tomato goes into the pan.
- The tomato quantityThe printed figure for tomatoes has lost its fraction and reads as a whole number; the proportion that works with six eggs is about 1 3/4 cups. Canned whole tomatoes, drained of their thinnest liquid and roughly broken up, are the closest match to what the book means by "tomatoes."
- Reduce before the eggs go inThis is the hinge. Five minutes of simmering is meant to drive off water; if the tomatoes are still loose, the eggs will weep and you will get scrambled eggs sitting in pink liquid. Cook them down until a spoon drawn through leaves a track.
- Heat and timing"Cook same as Scrambled Eggs" sends you back to the base recipe, which is cooked with constant stirring until the mass is just creamy and set; take the pan off while the eggs are still slightly loose. Figure four to six minutes over medium-low; the residual heat of the tomato finishes them.
- The slice of onionOne slice fried in the butter and then discarded is a flavouring technique, not an ingredient list error. It gives a faint allium background without onion texture. Modern equivalent: half a small onion, sliced thick so it lifts out cleanly.
- The sugarTwo teaspoons offsets the acidity of the canned tomatoes of the period, which are often said to have been sharper than modern ones. With modern canned tomatoes, start with one teaspoon and taste.
- ButterFour tablespoons for six eggs is generous by current habit and is part of why the curds stay soft. It can be cut to two or three without harming the dish.
- Entire wheat breadThe period name for whole wheat. Any dense whole-grain toast, or a slice of Boston brown bread, serves the same purpose of soaking up the sauce.
- YieldThree servings as a main breakfast dish, four as part of a larger meal.
Fannie Farmer's egg chapter runs through a long series of variations on the same base — a structure that reflects how the Boston Cooking School taught: master one method, then ring changes on it. The tomato version depends on the canned tomato, which by the 1890s was widely available in New England, and which appears throughout this book in places a fresh tomato could not have gone in February. The pairing of eggs and tomato is far older and turns up across the Mediterranean and the Middle East in dishes such as piperade and shakshuka, but Farmer's treatment is distinctly American in its restraint: sugar to soften the acid, a slice of onion removed before it can assert itself, and brown bread alongside.