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Fried Eggs, Piranees
Cut three green peppers into halves and remove the seeds. Heat a tablespoon olive oil in a black frying pan, add the peppers and fry for two minutes on each side, lift up and keep on a plate.
Cut six thin slices of raw, lean ham and fry in the same pan for one minute on each side. Arrange half a green pepper on each slice of ham in the pan and carefully crack twelve fresh eggs over them. Evenly season the eggs with a half teaspoon each salt and pepper, sprinkle over a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, then set them in the oven for six minutes. Remove, carefully glide on a large dish and serve.
A Basque-style pan of eggs baked over ham and sweet peppers. It moves fast once the eggs go in, so have everything within reach.
- The hinge: six minutesThe dish lives or dies on the eggs. Six minutes in a hot oven sets the whites and leaves the yolks soft, which is the point; another two minutes and you have a firm baked casserole instead. Pull the pan when the whites are just opaque, since carryover heat in cast iron keeps cooking them on the way to the table.
- "A black frying pan"Cast iron or heavy carbon steel, and it must go from burner to oven without a plastic handle. Use the widest pan you have: six slices of ham, six pepper halves and twelve eggs in one layer need a great deal of surface, and even a 12-inch pan will be crowded.
- Oven heatThe original names no temperature. A hot oven, somewhere around 400F, suits the timing given: hot enough to set the whites from above before the bottoms toughen.
- "Raw, lean ham"Most likely uncooked dry-cured ham -- Bayonne, serrano, prosciutto-style -- cut thin, which needs only the brief searing described. If you use fresh, uncured pork leg instead, one minute a side will not cook it through and it should be cooked properly before the eggs go anywhere near it.
- Green peppersOrdinary bell peppers work, but cooking of this region tends to use long, thin-walled green peppers of the piment doux type (Anaheim is the nearest widely sold equivalent), which soften in the two minutes allowed. Thick-walled bells stay crunchy; give them four or five minutes a side or peel them after charring.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon each of salt and pepper across twelve eggs is modest. Season the eggs after cracking, not before, and keep the salt off the yolks so they do not speckle.
- Yield and serviceSix servings, two eggs each. It cannot be held, so bring the pan to the table or slide it onto a warmed platter immediately -- the instruction to "glide" it off is easier with a wide offset spatula and a second pair of hands.
The title is most likely a printer's mangling of Pyrenees, and the dish belongs to the Basque and Bearnais cooking of that range, where sweet green peppers, cured ham and eggs are staples of the local table. Peppers reached southwestern France and northern Spain from the Americas in the sixteenth century and took hold there more thoroughly than anywhere else in France, to the point that a pepper-and-ham combination now reads as a regional signature. The pairing with dry-cured mountain ham is practical rather than invented: both the ham and the strings of dried or fresh peppers were larder staples of the same farmhouses. It is a short, plainly written "foreign" number that a hotel or a competent home cook could execute without special equipment -- one pan, seven minutes of stovetop work, and an oven.