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Tomatoes and Eggs
Put half a dozen ripe tomatoes into a saucepan with a very little water to prevent their burning and boil them; rub them through a fine sieve and mix in a little chopped onion, salt and pepper to taste, and two or three eggs. Turn the mixture into a fryingpan with a small quantity of butter, fry until done and serve on a dish. Finely-chopped ham may be added if desired.
A tomato scramble in the French style, closer to piperade than to American scrambled eggs. The whole success of it lies in driving the water out of the tomatoes before the eggs go anywhere near them.
- Reduce the tomatoes properlySix ripe tomatoes sieved will give you a great deal of thin juice. After sieving, return the pulp to the pan and cook it down until it mounds on a spoon rather than running off it, otherwise the eggs will weep and the dish turns to soup.
- Seed and skin at the sieve"Rub through a fine sieve" is the period method for removing skins and seeds in one step; a food mill or a coarse strainer does the same. Do not use a blender, which purees the skins back in and pales the color.
- Egg ratioTwo or three eggs to six tomatoes reads as a tomato dish bound with egg, not a tomato omelette. If you want something that eats like scrambled eggs, four to six eggs to a cup of reduced pulp is the more familiar proportion.
- Cook the onion firstChopped onion added to the pulp gets only the brief cooking of the frying stage and can stay sharp. Soften it in the butter in the frying pan before the tomato and egg go in.
- Low heat, and stop earlyEggs with acidic tomato tighten and go grainy fast; keep the heat gentle, stir constantly, and pull the pan while the mixture is still visibly loose, as it will set further on the dish.
- If you add hamUse cooked ham, finely chopped, and warm it in the butter with the onion. It also brings salt, so season at the end rather than the beginning.
- YieldServes two as a light supper or breakfast, three at a stretch alongside toast.
- Canned tomatoes workOut of season, a 28-oz can of whole tomatoes, drained and reduced, is closer to the intent than pale winter fresh ones. Skip the sieving and crush by hand.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is often taken to reflect the working repertoire of a hotel kitchen that fed both grand dinners and ordinary hungry guests, and the plainer entries like this one seem to show the second half of that job: quick egg dishes a cook could turn out for a late breakfast or a supper order. Tomatoes cooked down with eggs appears across the Mediterranean and beyond under many names, from Basque piperade to the Levantine dishes now widely known as shakshuka. The optional chopped ham may be the hotel economy showing through.