Home › Egg Dishes and Omelets › Scrambled Eggs with Pimentos
Scrambled Eggs with Pimentos
Use the above recipe substituting one-half cup of chopped canned pimentos for the peppers.
A one-line variation on the preceding scrambled-egg recipe, which in the Butterick book is built on eggs beaten with a little milk or cream and cooked slowly with chopped sweet peppers. Everything of substance here rests on the base recipe, so read that first.
- What the base recipe assumesEverything here depends on the preceding scrambled-egg recipe, which should be read first. The half cup of pimentos is a substitution for the peppers called for there, not an addition.
- Canned pimentosThese are skinned, roasted sweet red peppers packed in brine or their own juice, still sold in jars near the olives. Drain them well and blot dry; the packing liquid will thin the eggs and make them weep.
- Warm the pimentos firstCold, wet pimento stirred into eggs drops the pan temperature and makes them set unevenly. Heat the chopped pimento in the butter for a minute before the eggs go in.
- Heat and timingLow heat and constant slow stirring, pulled off the burner while the eggs still look slightly underdone. Some period recipes take eggs to a firmer, drier curd than modern taste prefers; carryover heat will finish them if you stop early.
History: Spanish-style sweet peppers were grown and canned commercially in the American South, Georgia in particular, from the early decades of the twentieth century, and canned pimentos moved from novelty to pantry staple in that period. They offered an inexpensive way to bring colour to plain food, and that is the job they do here: the Butterick book, published by a pattern-and-fashion house with a large domestic readership, treats the canned pimento as a straightforward substitute for fresh peppers that were seasonal in much of the country. The same impulse lies behind period pimento cheese, pimento-studded loaves and the olive stuffed with a sliver of red -- a small, cheap, reliably available bit of brightness on the plate.