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Eggs in Tomatoes
1 small onion
¼ teaspoon pepper
2 cups tomato
6 eggs
1 teaspoon salt
Toast
Cut the onion into small pieces and place with the tomato in a shallow pan. Stew very slowly for ten minutes. Add salt and pepper, then reduce the heat until the tomato stops bubbling. Break the eggs and slip them on top of the tomato, being careful not to break the yolks. Cook slowly until the whites of the eggs are set, then prick the yolks and let them mingle with the tomato and the whites. The mixture should be quite soft, but the red tomatoes should be quite distinct. Serve at once on buttered toast.
A straightforward poach-in-sauce, the ancestor of every skillet egg dish now sold as shakshuka. The whole recipe turns on heat control.
- The hinge: no bubblingThe instruction to "reduce the heat until the tomato stops bubbling" is the entire technique. Eggs slipped into simmering tomato will toughen and the whites will shred; the sauce should be hot but visually still. At that low a heat the whites will take a good while to set; the recipe gives no time and says nothing about covering the pan.
- 2 cups tomatoAt this date that could mean canned tomatoes, packed whole in their own juice, or fresh peeled ones stewed down. A 14-15 oz can, roughly chopped with its liquid, comes close, though it falls a little short of 2 cups. Modern canned tomatoes are often firmer and less watery, so ten minutes of slow stewing may need a splash of water.
- Shallow panUse a 10-inch skillet or saute pan, not a saucepan. The eggs need to sit in a single layer on the surface of the tomato, which a deep pan will not allow.
- Pricking the yolksDeliberate here: the dish is meant to finish as a soft scramble streaked with red, not as six intact poached eggs. If you prefer whole yolks, stop when the whites set and skip that step.
- Salt and pepperA full teaspoon of salt for 2 cups of tomato and six eggs is reasonable with unsalted canned tomatoes but heavy-handed with salted ones. Taste the tomato before the eggs go in.
- Egg donenessThe finished mixture is "quite soft," which means the yolks stay loose. Cooked this way the eggs are not brought to 160F, so use eggs you would be comfortable serving soft-poached.
- YieldSix eggs feeds three as a light main or four at breakfast. Have the toast buttered and waiting -- the mixture sets further off the heat and does not hold.
Egg dishes appear throughout household manuals like this one, and eggs were a cheap, year-round protein of the American kitchen, stretched into a meal with bread and a can of tomatoes. Tomatoes in cans were by 1900 one of the most reliable and inexpensive items in a grocer's stock, and recipes of the era often pair them with eggs, rice or macaroni. The method -- eggs cooked directly in a seasoned tomato base rather than poached separately and sauced -- appears across the Mediterranean and North Africa in forms now familiar as shakshuka, menemen and uova in purgatorio, though there is no evidence of a direct line to this particular American version; the shared logic is simply that a pan of stewed tomato is the gentlest and most flavorful place to set an egg.