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Eggs with Tomato Sauce
Boil until hard, three eggs; peel and cut the whites into strips and put these over the fire with tomato sauce and let them get quite hot. Put a layer of this on a hot dish with pieces of fried bread all around. Chop the yolks of the eggs, put a layer over the sauce and egg white, then more tomato and more chopped egg, and so on until the yolks of the eggs and the tomato sauce are all dished, having a layer of the yolks on top.
A frugal supper dish built from three hard-boiled eggs and a cup or so of tomato sauce, layered rather than mixed. The whole thing takes fifteen minutes once the sauce is made.
- The hinge: keep the whites and yolks apartThe whole point of the dish is the contrast between the strips of white warmed through in the sauce and the dry crumbled yolk sifted over the top. Sieve or chop the yolks fine and add them only as you build the layers, off the heat, or they turn to paste in the sauce.
- QuantitiesOscar gives no sauce measurement. Figure on 1 to 1 1/4 cups of tomato sauce for three eggs; much more and the layering collapses into soup. As written it serves two as a light course, or one as a supper.
- Tomato sauce, 1896 styleThe recipe assumes a cooked tomato sauce of the period, not raw passata and not a garlicky pasta sauce. A thickened, well-reduced tomato sauce holds the layers; a thin one runs across the plate.
- Hard-boiling"Boil until hard" gives no timing, and a long boil greys the yolk. Nine minutes off the boil, then straight into cold water, gives a firm yolk you can still crumble and a white that slices into clean strips.
- Fried breadThe recipe calls only for pieces of fried bread as a border; fry them in butter or clarified fat until crisp, and fry them last so they are still crisp when the dish reaches the table.
- Serve hot, assemble lateEverything is warmed rather than baked, so the dish only works straight from the stove onto a heated plate. Built ahead, the fried bread softens and the yolk absorbs sauce.
This is hotel cooking at its most economical: a garnish dish, the sort of thing a Waldorf kitchen produced for a light luncheon or a late supper when a guest wanted eggs but not another omelette. Dishes of hard-boiled eggs layered or masked with sauce run all through nineteenth-century service cookery, usually filed under names like oeufs a l'aurore when the sauce is tomato or paprika-tinted and the sieved yolk is scattered over the top for color. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 Cook Book collected such short, unfussy formulas alongside the grand banquet menus. The reliance on fried bread as a border is characteristic of the period, when crisp croutons did the structural work that a modern cook might give to toast or a shallow gratin dish.