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Fried Eggs with Apples
Peel and core three medium, sweet apples, then cut in six slices each and season all over with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Thoroughly heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a large frying pan, add apples one beside another and fry for two minutes on each side. Carefully crack twelve fresh eggs over apples, season evenly with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, fry for a minute on range, place in oven for six minutes, remove, carefully glide on a hot dish and serve.
A one-pan supper dish that behaves like a frittata built on fried apple rings. The whole thing hinges on the apples being cooked through before the eggs go in, since after that point everything is governed by the eggs.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "two saltspoons pepper" is a half teaspoon. The recipe seasons twice, apples and eggs, for a total of a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of pepper across twelve eggs — generous but not unreasonable.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, somewhere around 350F, suits this; much hotter and the whites toughen and the bottom risks scorching before the tops set.
- Pan and transferYou need an oven-safe skillet, ideally cast iron, 12 inches or larger so twelve eggs sit in one layer. "Glide on a hot dish" means sliding the whole slab out intact, which works only if the pan was properly hot and buttered.
- Butter is thinA tablespoon and a half of butter for eighteen apple slices and a dozen eggs is lean by modern habit. Three tablespoons gives you browning on the apples and a cleaner release.
- Apples'Sweet' here most likely means a mild eating apple rather than a tart cooker. Golden Delicious, Gala or Braeburn hold their shape through frying; soft cooking apples of the Bramley type break down much faster and are less likely to come through the frying intact.
- DonenessSix minutes at 350F sets the whites and leaves the yolks soft. If you want the yolks firm, or are serving anyone who should avoid loose yolks, go to nine or ten minutes and check that the yolks are no longer fluid.
- YieldTwelve eggs and three apples serve four to six as a main course. Cut into wedges through the apple slices rather than trying to lift individual eggs.
Frying apples in butter and setting eggs over them is often traced to the farmhouse cooking of northern Europe, where apples were one of the few sweet things available all winter from the cellar and were treated as a vegetable rather than a dessert hat pairing of apple with black pudding and potato. The dish is a fair example of what such books did well, which is to record cheap, fast, one-pan food that needed no explanation in its home country and a great deal of explanation everywhere else.