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Baked Eggs in Tomato Sauce
12 tablespoons thick tomato
6 tablespoons grated cheese
Salt and pepper soup
6 poached eggs
Grease small ramekins and place two tablespoons tomato sauce cover with grated in each. Lay a poached egg in each dish, cover with grated cheese, season with salt and pepper, and bake in a quick oven (two or three minutes) to brown the cheese. The oven must be very hot, as the cheese should be nicely colored while the eggs are still soft and creamy.
The ingredient list has been mangled in transcription — read it as 12 tablespoons thick tomato soup or sauce, 6 tablespoons grated cheese, 6 poached eggs, and salt and pepper. The whole dish turns on oven heat, not oven time.
- Quick ovenA "quick oven" in period terms is roughly 400-450F, and this recipe insists the oven be "very hot," so set it near the top of its range (about 450-475F) and let it come fully up to temperature, or use the broiler with the ramekins on an upper rack. Much less heat and two or three minutes will warm the eggs through and firm the yolks before the cheese takes colour.
- "Thick tomato" soupRead this as a thick tomato puree or sauce rather than a thin cream soup. Canned condensed tomato soup used undiluted, or a tomato sauce reduced until it mounds on the spoon, both work; anything thin will flood the ramekin and boil.
- Poach on the soft sideThe eggs go into the oven already cooked, so poach them 2 to 2.5 minutes only — the whites just set, yolks entirely liquid. They will firm slightly under the heat.
- Drain the eggsLift each poached egg onto a folded towel for a moment before setting it on the sauce. Poaching water carried into the dish thins the tomato and keeps the cheese from browning.
- Cheese choiceA tablespoon per ramekin is a thin veil, so use something that colours fast and tastes of itself: Parmesan, aged Gruyère, or a dry sharp Cheddar. Fresh mozzarella and other high-moisture cheeses will steam rather than brown in the time allowed.
- RamekinsIndividual dishes of about 4 ounces, wide rather than deep, so the egg sits in a single layer. Grease them and warm the sauce before assembling, which shortens the time in the oven still further.
- Yield and servingSix ramekins, one per person as a first course or two for a lunch dish. Serve immediately with toast; the eggs continue cooking in the hot dish and are stiff within a few minutes.
Egg dishes baked and served in their own small dish are what nineteenth-century menus called oeufs en cocotte; a related but distinct preparation, oeufs sur le plat, also appears in English books — a French restaurant idea that reached American home cooking through the household manuals. Butterick, a pattern company that built a publishing arm around the domestic reader, printed the sort of recipe that made a small quantity of leftovers look like a course: a spoonful of yesterday's tomato soup, an egg, a dusting of cheese. The combination of poached egg, tomato and cheese is essentially a deconstructed gratin, and it belongs to the same turn-of-the-century enthusiasm for individually portioned ramekin service that also produced the creamed-oyster cocotte.