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Eggs, Cienfuegos
Heat in a saucepan one tablespoon melted butter, add one green pepper and a half onion, finely chopped; lightly brown five minutes, then add three finely chopped peeled red tomatoes and three finely sliced vinegar pickles. Season with three saltspoons salt, three saltspoons sugar and one saltspoon white pepper; mix well and let cook eight minutes, lightly stirring occasionally. Add half ounce good butter, mix a little and divide into six shirred-egg dishes. Carefully crack two fresh eggs into each dish, season evenly with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, set in oven to bake three minutes, remove and serve.
A Cuban-flavored version of shirred eggs: a quick sofrito of pepper, onion and tomato spread under the eggs before baking. The measurements are Filippini's usual saltspoons, and the baking time is the one figure that cannot be taken at face value.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons salt is 3/4 teaspoon, one saltspoon white pepper a scant 1/4 teaspoon.
- The seasoning on the eggsHalf a teaspoon of salt and two saltspoons of pepper divided over twelve eggs is right; scattered over one or two dishes it would be brutal. Season each dish with a pinch, not a measured spoonful.
- Baking timeThree minutes will not set anything. Shirred eggs need 8 to 12 minutes at 375F for set whites and soft yolks, and the vegetable base should be hot when the eggs go on so the whites begin cooking from below. Pull them when the whites are just opaque; carryover heat in the dishes finishes them.
- Shirred-egg dishesSmall shallow ceramic or glass gratin dishes, ramekins about 4 inches across, or an ovenproof egg dish. Butter them well; the half ounce of good butter stirred in at the end enriches the base, and may also help keep it from sticking to the dish.
- Vinegar picklesPlain sour cucumber pickles in brine, not sweet gherkins or bread-and-butter chips. Sliced thin, they supply the acid that keeps the tomato base from tasting flat. Drain them well or the base will be watery.
- The tomato baseEight minutes of cooking should leave a thick, spoonable mixture rather than a sauce. If the tomatoes are juicy, keep the pan uncovered and let it reduce, or the eggs will poach in liquid instead of baking.
- YieldSix dishes of two eggs each, so six servings as a breakfast or light supper course. The base halves easily enough.
Cienfuegos is a port on the southern coast of Cuba, and the name here signals the flavor rather than any documented local dish: green pepper, onion and tomato browned in fat is the sofrito that underpins most Cuban and Spanish-Caribbean cooking. Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, built The International Cook Book (1906) around thousands of short recipes labeled with the cities and countries that were thought to have inspired them, a common conceit in grand-hotel cookery of the period, where a place name on a menu did the work of a description. Shirred eggs, baked in individual dishes over some savory bed, were a workhorse of that repertoire precisely because the bed could be changed and renamed indefinitely. The pickles are the odd note in this version.