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Eggs in Tomato Cups
Eggs Tomatoes Cream Sauce Cut a slice from stem end of tomato, scrape out the center and sprinkle the out the center and sprinkle the cavity with a few drops of vinegar.
Break and carefully drop a raw egg in each. Place apart on a buttered pan and bake in a moderate oven until the eggs are set. Serve with cream sauce.
A short recipe that assumes you already know two things the book never spells out: what cream sauce is, and how long a raw egg needs in a tomato shell. The line "scrape out the center and sprinkle the" is duplicated in the original typesetting; read it once.
- Moderate oven350F. At much above that the tomato collapses before the white sets, and the yolk goes chalky.
- TimingNone is given. Figure 20 to 25 minutes for a set white and a still-soft yolk in a medium tomato; a large one runs closer to 30. Judge by the white, which should be opaque with no clear liquid pooling.
- Choose the tomato for structureA firm, thick-walled tomato of about 6 oz holds an egg without splitting. Very ripe or thin-walled fruit slumps and leaks into the pan.
- Drain the shellsScraped tomatoes give off a surprising amount of liquid, which thins the egg and steams it rather than baking it. Salt the cavities lightly, invert them for ten minutes, then blot dry before the vinegar goes in.
- The vinegarA few drops only. The recipe gives no reason for it; on this quantity it reads as seasoning rather than acidity you are meant to taste. Cider or white wine vinegar suits it better than malt.
- Cream sauceThe book does not say, but a plain white sauce is the usual reading: 1 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp flour, 1 cup milk or half milk and half cream, cooked out for a couple of minutes and seasoned with salt and white pepper; nutmeg is optional. Make it while the eggs bake and keep it warm with a lid on.
- Pan and spacing"Place apart on a buttered pan" matters because tomatoes that touch steam each other. A muffin tin or small ramekins hold them upright better than a flat sheet.
- YieldOne tomato per person at breakfast, two for a lunch dish, with toast to catch the sauce.
Baked eggs in a hollowed vegetable belong to the era when the individual portion became fashionable in American middle-class cooking: ramekins, timbales, stuffed peppers and tomato cups all appear together in books from the 1890s through the 1920s, since they made a small amount of egg or meat look like a composed course. Cookbooks aimed at a young woman running her first kitchen often carried dishes like this one, which are cheap, need no carving and can be assembled ahead of the oven. The reliance on a cream sauce to finish is characteristic: white sauce was widely treated as a foundation a housekeeper would already have learned, so recipes often simply named it and moved on. The tomato's old reputation as a suspect fruit had largely faded by the middle of the nineteenth century, and that reputation is itself often overstated in later retellings; by this point the fruit was common enough in summer to be treated as a container rather than a treat.