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Columbus Eggs
Take eight fine green peppers, large enough to contain one egg each; cut off the tops and empty them well, being careful to extract every seed; stand them upright in a sautepan, and break an egg into each one, then set the pan in the oven for eight or ten minutes. Take out, lay the peppers on toasts and pour a little tomato sauce around.
Eggs, Creole Style Fry one teaspoonful of well-chopped onion in colorless oil, an equal quantity of finely-sliced hot pepper, and a quarter of a clove of crushed garlic and a peeled tomato cut in half, pressed out and cut up into small squares; simmer, reduce it and when it has attained a sufficient consistency, add a couple of tablespoonfuls of crushed rice, salt and a little cayenne pepper. Then cover the bottom of the dish with this mixture, and break over the eggs carefully, keeping the yolks whole, pour over some melted butter, and season with salt on the white of the eggs, and in the middle of the yolks, place a little melted butter, and cook until done in a moderate oven.
Two egg dishes run together in the original text: eggs baked inside hollowed peppers, and eggs baked over a Creole tomato base. Both are simple, and both hide a timing problem.
- The hinge: soften the peppers firstA raw green pepper will not cook through in the eight to ten minutes the egg needs. Blanch the hollowed shells two or three minutes in boiling salted water, or roast them briefly, and drain them upside down before filling.
- Oven temperatureThe first recipe gives none; the second says "moderate," usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Bake both at 350F. Eight to ten minutes will likely leave the whites of the pepper-baked eggs loose; twelve to fifteen is more realistic for a set white and soft yolk.
- Standing them uprightA sautepan will not hold eight peppers steady. A muffin tin, or ramekins, or a snug baking dish packed so they brace each other, does the job. Trim a sliver from the base only if the pepper leans, or the egg runs out.
- "Colorless oil"Most likely a light, neutral oil rather than olive oil or butter, which would colour and scent the sauce. Any mild vegetable oil works.
- "Crushed rice"Ambiguous: either cooked rice mashed coarsely, or ground/broken rice, used here to thicken the Creole base and give it body. Two tablespoons into a sauce built from a single tomato makes a thick, spoonable bed, not a soup.
- "Hot pepper"Oscar means a fresh chile, sliced thin, not dried flakes. A teaspoon of it plus a little cayenne makes a genuinely warm sauce for two people; scale it down if that is not the intention.
- YieldEight peppers serve four as a first course or two or three at breakfast. The Creole quantities as written cover a single small gratin dish of two to four eggs; multiply the sauce if you want more.
- Serving the peppersThe toast underneath is structural as much as anything, absorbing what leaks. Cut it to the footprint of the pepper and toast it dry so it does not go to pulp under the tomato sauce.
The name is a joke about the egg, not about America. The story generally traced to Columbus has him challenged at a banquet to stand an egg on its end, which he does by tapping the shell flat. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel whose name carried the Waldorf's reputation from 1893 until his retirement in 1943, assembled his 1896 book from the hotel's working repertoire, and its egg chapter is enormous: the hotel served eggs at all hours and needed dozens of ways to differentiate them on a menu. The Creole recipe sitting immediately after is a piece of the same commercial logic, borrowing New Orleans seasoning at a moment when Creole cookery was fashionable in Northern hotel dining rooms.