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Cuban Eggs
6 eggs
½ teaspoon salt
¼ cup sausage meat
Pepper
1 teaspoon chopped onion
Cook the meat and onion together for five minutes. Beat the eggs until light, add the seasonings, and pour into the pan with the meat. Cook slowly, stirring constantly, until the eggs are thick and creamy. Serve with buttered toast or poured over slices of toast.
A soft scramble enriched with sausage fat, written for a cook who already knows how eggs behave. The whole dish hinges on low heat and constant motion.
- Quantities and yieldSix eggs with a quarter cup of bulk sausage serves two generously or three modestly. The sausage is a seasoning here, not a filling, so keep it to about 2 oz.
- Sausage meatThis means uncased bulk breakfast sausage or the contents of a fresh link, not a cured or smoked sausage. Break it into small crumbles so it disperses through the egg.
- Five minutes is not always enoughThe original assumes a thin scattering of meat in a hot pan. Cook the sausage until no pink remains and it has rendered its fat, then soften the onion in that fat; pork must reach 160F even when it will be cooked again with the eggs.
- Fat in the panThere is no added butter or oil, because the sausage is expected to supply it. Lean modern sausage may render very little, so add a teaspoon of butter before the eggs go in or they will catch.
- "Cook slowly, stirring constantly"This is the instruction that matters. Keep the pan over low heat and move the eggs continuously with a spatula or wooden spoon; pull them off while they still look slightly underdone, as they carry over off the heat.
- Beating the eggs "until light"Thirty seconds with a fork until the whites and yolks are uniform and just frothy. Beating to a foam does nothing useful for a scramble and can make the curds weep.
- ServingSpooned over toast the eggs cool fast, so warm the plates and toast at the last minute.
The Butterick book belongs to a wave of American household manuals published by pattern and magazine companies in the early twentieth century, apparently aimed at young housekeepers cooking without servants. Dishes labelled "Cuban," "Spanish" or "Creole" in such books rarely have much to do with the places named; the tag seems in most cases to have signalled the presence of onion, pepper, sausage or tomato, anything with a hint of warmth beyond the plain boiled-and-buttered norm. Cuba was much in the American public eye after 1898, and its name attached itself to menu items with the same looseness that put "Spanish" in front of any rice cooked with tomato. What the recipe does show accurately is the period's fondness for stretching a small amount of meat across a pan of eggs, and for serving anything soft and savoury over toast.