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EGGS (Break matzoth a kind)
Break matzoth (a kind of cracker sold chiefly in Jewish shops) in pieces and soak in cold water until soft. Press out the water and mix with well-beaten eggs and salt. Heat pan, put in a little butter, add the matzoth mixture, and stir until eggs are lightly cooked. Serve for breakfast.
1/2 cup sugar 1/8 teaspoonful soda Scant 3/4 cup sifted Little Gold Cakes (Using up Yolks of Eggs) 1 tablespoonful butter teaspoonful soda Scant cup sifted bread flour cup sugar 4 egg yolks (beaten till very thick) 1/4 cup sour cream Grated nutmeg Few grains salt Cream butter and sugar together, add beaten yolks, and beat hard. Combine soda, dissolved in very little hot water, with cream, add to egg mixture, quickly add flour, salt, and nutmeg, and bake in small tins. Frost when cold and place candied cherry on top of each.
Two separate recipes have run together on this page: matzo brei, a scrambled-egg dish for using up matzoth, and a small yolk-only cake. Both are workable, though the cake's measurements have lost their fractions in printing.
- MatzothMatzo, the unleavened flatbread eaten at Passover, is now sold in any supermarket. Modern recipes run to roughly a sheet per egg, though proportions vary; the book gives none.
- SoakingCold water and a brief soak is right — matzo softens in under a minute and turns to paste if left. Squeeze it firmly, or the eggs will not set and you get wet curds.
- The hinge for the breiCook over moderate heat and stop while the eggs still look slightly underdone. Matzo holds heat and the mixture keeps cooking off the pan; carried too far it goes dry and squeaky.
- Sweet or savourySalt is specified here, but matzo brei is equally traditional finished with sugar, cinnamon or jam. Decide before cooking, as the butter browns differently with sugar in the pan.
- Missing fractions in the cakeThe printed text reads "teaspoonful soda" and "cup sugar" where the original almost certainly had fractions. Half a teaspoon of soda and half a cup of sugar suit one scant cup of flour, four yolks and a quarter cup of sour cream; treat these as reconstructions, not the author's figures.
- Soda and sour creamThe soda is dissolved in water and stirred into the cream so it reacts with the cream's acid. That reaction starts at once, which is why the flour goes in "quickly" and the tins into the oven straight after.
- Bread flourPeriod "bread flour" was a hard-wheat flour distinguished from pastry flour; its protein content is not directly comparable to any modern grade. All-purpose will give a tender crumb here.
- Oven and tinsNo temperature is given. Small cakes of this type bake at 375F for 12 to 18 minutes depending on the tin; they are done when a skewer comes out clean and the tops spring back.
- YieldNo quantities are given for the matzo mixture, so its yield cannot be fixed. The cake batter fills roughly a dozen small tins or a standard muffin pan two-thirds full.
Matzo brei is the classic Passover use for leftover matzo, when leavened bread is absent from the house and the unleavened sheets accumulate over eight days; its inclusion in a general American "left overs" book, with the parenthetical explanation that matzoth is "a kind of cracker sold chiefly in Jewish shops," shows a Jewish home dish being introduced to a wider readership around the turn of the twentieth century, when Central and Eastern European Jewish immigration was reshaping urban American food. The second recipe belongs to a whole genre of the period: cooks who used whites for angel cake, meringues and icings were left with yolks that spoiled quickly in an unrefrigerated pantry, and cookbooks answered with gold cakes, custards and yolk cookies. The sour cream and soda pairing is older still, a standard leavening in households that soured their own cream before commercial baking powder became cheap and reliable.