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Eggs, Einstein
Cut covers from the tops of six fresh, ripe, medium-sized tomatoes, then scoop out the interior with a spoon without cutting the shells, placing the soft part in a demi-glace pot. Season the interior with a light teaspoon salt, teaspoon sugar and light half teaspoon pepper. Mix on a plate one ounce butter with half teaspoon each chopped parsley and chives, divide this preparation evenly in the six tomato shells, place on a tin, then set in oven for ten minutes. Remove, crack one fresh egg into each tomato shell, evenly season with a half teaspoon each salt and pepper. Cut six small, thin pieces raw lean bacon, then lay a piece on top of each egg, set in oven for six minutes, remove, dress on a dish, pour a ham sauce over them and serve.
A baked stuffed-tomato-and-egg dish from the Delmonico tradition, written for a cook who already knows the house sauces. Two things need attention: the oven temperature, which is never stated, and the bacon, which will not cook through in six minutes.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate to moderately hot oven, 375-400F, suits both stages: ten minutes to soften the shells and warm the butter, six to seven more to set the eggs.
- Demi-glace potThe pot associated with the kitchen's demi-glace. The scooped tomato pulp is directed into it rather than discarded; the recipe does not say what is then done with it.
- The baconRaw bacon laid on an egg and given six minutes emerges flabby and undercooked. Render the slices most of the way in a pan first, then lay them over the eggs for the last few minutes so they finish crisp while the whites set.
- Egg donenessSix minutes may well leave the whites underset; allow longer if needed, and deeper or larger tomatoes longer still. The whites should be opaque with no clear liquid at the edge of the yolk.
- Seasoning quantitiesHalf a teaspoon of pepper divided over six eggs is heavy by modern taste, and the ham sauce brings its own salt. A few grinds per egg and a light pinch of salt is closer to what most cooks want.
- Ham sauceNot given in the recipe itself: broadly a brown sauce or demi-glace finished with finely chopped lean ham. A reduced brown sauce with minced prosciutto or country ham stirred in at the end approximates it.
- Choosing tomatoesUse firm, ripe, thick-walled tomatoes and salt the hollowed shells before the first bake so they shed some water. Thin, over-ripe fruit collapses in the oven and floods the plate.
- YieldSix, one tomato each as a first course or luncheon dish; two apiece makes a main.
The name follows the Delmonico's convention of christening dishes after regular patrons and public figures, a habit Alexander Filippini carried from the restaurant into his cookbooks, where garnishes and preparations are labelled for people rather than described. The Einstein here has no connection to the physicist; the name may well be a customer's surname, though nothing in the book settles the question. The dish itself belongs to a whole family of egg preparations built on a hollowed vegetable case - eggs in tomato, in artichoke bottoms, in mushroom caps - which gave a hotel kitchen an elegant plate assembled from a shell, an egg, a scrap of bacon and a ladle of whatever sauce was already standing on the stove. That reliance on a mother sauce made elsewhere in the book is why the recipe ends so abruptly with "pour a ham sauce over them": the sauce was, in all likelihood, already to hand.