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Eggs, Sullivan
Plunge six even-sized sound green peppers in boiling water six minutes, take up and with a coarse towel remove skins, place on a tin and set in oven five minutes. Remove, cut off stems, then cut away a piece from stem side a quarter-inch thick to serve as a cover. Remove all seeds. Carefully crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add one small truffle cut in exceedingly small square pieces, one tablespoon sherry, half gill sweet cream, half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne and half saltspoon grated nutmeg. Beat with a whisk one minute. Heat an ounce good fresh butter in a sautoire, add eggs and cook for six minutes, frequently and briskly stirring them meanwhile. Remove and fill inside of the peppers. Place cover on each. Place six round slices of toast on a hot dish, place the green peppers on top. Pour a gill of hot tomato sauce over them and serve.
A hotel-style scrambled egg, richly seasoned, served inside a blanched bell pepper. The whole thing lives or dies on the eggs, which are meant to come off the heat still loose.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup and the gill of tomato sauce is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, which makes the cayenne 1/4 teaspoon and the nutmeg a scant 1/8.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow sauté pan. Any wide nonstick or well-seasoned skillet works; the width matters more than the shape, since the eggs need surface area to set evenly while being stirred.
- Green peppersOrdinary green bell peppers, chosen even in size so they stand upright. The six-minute boil plus five minutes in the oven is enough to soften them without collapse; they should still hold their shape when filled.
- PeelingThe coarse towel is doing the work of a modern peeler. Blanched peppers slip their skins readily while hot, so work fast and use a dry cloth rather than a wet one.
- Six minutes of eggsThat timing assumes low heat and constant stirring, producing a soft, creamy curd rather than dry flakes. Pull the pan when the eggs are still visibly loose; they will finish setting inside the hot peppers before they reach the table.
- TruffleOne small truffle, minced fine. If none is at hand, a teaspoon of truffle paste or a few finely chopped sauteed cremini with a drop of truffle oil gets the register, though not the perfume. The dish is perfectly good without it.
- Tomato sauceHalf a cup across six servings is a token pour rather than a proper sauce. Warm a full cup of a plain, smooth tomato sauce so each pepper gets a real spoonful.
- YieldSix peppers on six rounds of toast, one per person as a lunch or supper dish. Cut the toast rounds a little wider than the base of the peppers so nothing tips.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), and it is a specimen of a whole genre: the personal-name dish. Filippini spent decades in the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, where naming a preparation for a regular patron, a visiting singer or a colleague was standard practice, and cookbooks assembled from that world are dense with Eggs Somebody and Chicken Somebody-Else. Who Sullivan was is not recorded in the book, and there is no reason to think the recipe is older than the naming of it. What the dish does record is the late nineteenth-century restaurant taste for scrambled eggs treated as a luxury item -- enriched with cream, spiked with sherry, studded with truffle, and then given an architectural presentation inside a hollowed vegetable.