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Canada Eggs
Empty out sufficient of the inside part of some fine round fresh tomatoes to have each one contain a raw egg, which is to be broken into it, season with salt and pepper, and cover the tomatoes with a tablespoonful of cream sauce; place them on a baking-tin in a slack oven to cook slowly for fifteen minutes, then serve on toasts the same size as the tomatoes; pour a brown sauce around, and serve.
A baked egg in a hollowed tomato, dressed with two of the classic sauces. The whole dish hinges on the tomato holding its shape while the egg sets, so the tomato has to be firm and drained before the egg goes in.
- Slack ovenA slack oven is a cool one, roughly 250-325F by modern reckoning. At that temperature 15 minutes will barely set the whites of the eggs; bake until the whites are opaque and firm and the yolk is as you want it, which usually takes longer, or work at 350F and watch it.
- Egg donenessBaked eggs in a shell of tomato cook unevenly because the tomato gives off water and steams them. Judge by the white, not the clock, and if you are serving anyone who should avoid soft eggs, cook to a set yolk (160F).
- Choosing and prepping the tomatoesUse small, dense, thick-walled tomatoes, not soft field tomatoes. Cut the top off, scoop out seeds and pulp, salt the inside lightly and invert on a rack for 10-15 minutes so the shell does not flood the egg with juice.
- Cream sauceCream sauce of this period is generally a thin white sauce: butter and flour cooked without colour, let down with milk or cream and seasoned. One tablespoon per tomato is all that is called for, as a lid rather than a pool.
- Brown sauceThe brown sauce would be an espagnole or demi-glace sort of thing, a roux-thickened brown veal or beef stock reduced until it coats. A good reduced beef stock lightly thickened stands in for it; the recipe has it poured around, not over the egg.
- ToastsCut rounds of firm white bread with a cutter the diameter of the tomatoes so nothing overhangs, and toast them dry. Untoasted or oversized bread goes to pulp under the brown sauce.
- Support in the panTomatoes tip and split as they soften. Set them in a buttered muffin tin or in a shallow dish where they can lean on each other.
- YieldOne tomato per egg. Two apiece makes a first course or a light luncheon dish for four; the original gives no count.
Nineteenth-century hotel cookery ran to a great many egg preparations, most of them distinguished only by a garnish and a national or personal name — à la Bordelaise, à la Turque — because a hotel breakfast and luncheon card needed that much variety from a cheap, fast ingredient. "Canada Eggs" has no documented connection to Canada beyond that naming habit; such titles were often assigned freely in hotel kitchens and need not reflect origin. What the recipe does show plainly is the period's confidence in stocked sauces: a cook could reach for both a finished cream sauce and a finished brown sauce at any hour, so a dish of eggs and tomatoes could be built in minutes from things already simmering on the range. Baking eggs in a hollowed vegetable was itself well established by then, tomatoes having moved in a few decades from suspicion to ubiquity on American menus.