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Eggs in Tomato
Take six eggs; one pint of tomato; one small onion; one teaspoon of salt; one-fourth teaspoon of pepper. Cut the onion into small pieces, place these with the tomato in a frying-pan, stew very slowly for ten minutes, and add the salt and pepper. Set the pan back, break the eggs and slip them on top of the tomato, taking care not to break the yolks. Return the pan to the heat, and cook slowly until the whites of the eggs are thoroughly set; then prick the yolks and let them mingle with the tomato and whites. The mixture should be quite soft, but the red tomatoes and the white and yellow of the eggs should be quite distinct. Serve at once on buttered toast.
A shirred-egg dish cooked entirely on the stovetop — the ancestor of what most people now call eggs in purgatory or shakshuka. The only real skill is heat control.
- The hinge: low heat, lid onThe hinge: low heat -- Nothing here should sizzle; the recipe says "cook slowly". Covering the pan is not in the original but helps the whites set from above as well as below; over direct heat the bottoms toughen long before the tops are opaque. Figure roughly 6 to 10 minutes once the eggs go in.
- "One pint of tomato"Two cups. Measuring tomato by volume suggests canned or home-put-up tomato, pulp and juice together, though the recipe does not say so. A 14- to 15-oz can with its liquid is close enough; if using fresh, peel and chop about 1¼ to 1½ lb.
- Ten minutes is not enough for canned tomatoTen minutes may not be enough -- Stew the tomato until it mounds slightly on a spoon rather than running, or the eggs will slide around in liquid and refuse to set neatly.
- Frying-panA wide skillet with a lid, ideally 10 inches for six eggs. Enamelled cast iron or stainless is better than bare cast iron here, since tomato acid pulls metal off unseasoned iron.
- Slipping the eggs inBreak each into a cup first and pour it into a shallow depression pressed in the tomato with the back of a spoon. Six eggs need the space; crowd them and the whites fuse into a single sheet.
- Pricking the yolksThe instruction is deliberate — the yolks are meant to loosen and streak the sauce, not to be stirred in. Do it off the heat, or the residual warmth will carry the yolks past the soft stage the recipe asks for.
- YieldThree to four servings, one or two eggs each, on buttered toast. Thick-cut bread holds up better than sandwich slices against a wet tomato base.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt for two cups of tomato plus six eggs is reasonable if the tomatoes are unsalted; taste before adding it all if the can is already salted.
Eggs poached in a tomato base turn up across the whole Mediterranean and Middle East — Italian eggs in purgatory, North African and Levantine dishes now grouped under the name shakshuka — but its appearance in an American household manual of the 1910s may have less to do with any of them than with the ready supply of canned tomatoes. Canned tomatoes were among the earliest reliably good commercial preserves, cheap and available all winter, and it is tempting to read recipes of the period as leaning on them to make an inexpensive protein like eggs into something that reads as a dish. The Butterick company published its cook book as part of the same domestic-advice business that sold dress patterns and The Delineator, and the recipe's fussy insistence that the red, white and yellow stay "quite distinct" is characteristic of that era's cooking instruction, which cared a great deal about how a plate looked coming to the table.