Home › The World's Kitchen › Eggs, Bertschmann
Eggs, Bertschmann
Cut three fresh red tomatoes in four slices each. Season with half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon sugar, three saltspoons pepper and lightly roll in flour. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a black frying pan, place tomatoes on the pan and briskly fry two minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a dish. Have three quarts boiling water in a saucepan with two tablespoons vinegar and level tablespoon salt. Carefully crack in six fresh eggs and poach three minutes. Lift up with a skimmer, neatly trim, arrange on the tomatoes; prepare six more in same way, place them on the other tomatoes. Broil six very thin slices bacon two minutes on each side, place them over the eggs and serve.
A hot-plate breakfast dish built in three quick stages: fried tomato slices, poached eggs, broiled bacon. Everything hinges on having all three ready at once, so read the whole thing before lighting a burner.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper. That is a lot for three tomatoes; half that is closer to modern taste.
- Black frying panHeavy iron, the blackened surface giving the name; period kitchens also kept tinned and copper pans. It matters here because the floured tomato slices want a surface that holds high heat and browns rather than steams.
- Order of workPoached eggs cool fast and fried tomatoes go soft. Set the water on before the tomatoes, fry and hold the slices in a low oven, poach both batches in quick succession, and broil the bacon last while the eggs drain.
- TomatoesCut thick, about half an inch, or four slices from one tomato will fall apart in the flour. Two minutes a side over brisk heat gives colour without turning them to pulp; pat the cut faces dry before flouring.
- The poaching waterThree quarts is generous and deliberate, since a large volume barely drops in temperature when six eggs go in. Keep it at a bare shiver rather than a rolling boil, or the whites shred.
- Three minutesThat yields a set white and a liquid yolk in a very fresh egg. Older supermarket eggs spread more; a slotted spoon and a shallow bowl to slip each one in from will keep them together.
- Neatly trimRestaurant practice: shear off the ragged skirts of white with a knife or the edge of a spoon once the egg is out of the water. Purely cosmetic, but it is why the finished plate looks composed.
- BaconVery thin slices under a broiler for two minutes a side will scorch on most modern equipment. Watch it and pull it at the point it stiffens; it is a garnish, not a rasher.
- YieldTwelve tomato slices, twelve eggs, six bacon slices. Serves four generously or six at a larger breakfast.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era when a hotel or club dish was signed with a name, and this one carries someone's surname the way Eggs Benedict or Eggs Meyerbeer do. The construction, though, is standard Gilded Age chafing-dish and breakfast-room grammar: a starchy or vegetable base, a poached egg squared off with a knife, a strip of bacon across the top. Fried tomato slices dredged in flour were common on American breakfast tables well before this book, in green and ripe versions alike, and pairing them with eggs made a hot dish out of ingredients a kitchen already had standing. The vinegar in the poaching water is a professional habit of the period, held to firm the white, and the specification of a black pan is a reminder that a working kitchen owned several kinds of frying pan and chose between them on purpose.