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Fried Eggs with Green Peppers
Plunge three, large, sound, thick, green peppers in boiling water for three minutes; remove, then take off the skin with a towel and cut them into halves. Suppress the seeds. Heat a teaspoon oil in a very small frying pan; cut half a pepper in four lengthwise slices; place the slices in the pan; sprinkle two saltspoons salt over them evenly, then gently fry for one minute on each side. Carefully crack two fresh eggs on the peppers, fry for one and a half minutes on the range, then place in the hot oven for half a minute; remove, gently slide on a hot dish and keep warm; then proceed with five more in the same way and send to the table very hot.
A short-order dish scaled for a household table: three peppers, twelve eggs, six plates, cooked two eggs at a time in a small pan. The instructions assume a range hot enough to set an egg white in ninety seconds and an oven standing open beside it.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two per half pepper is half a teaspoon of salt on four slices — heavy by current taste, and it multiplies to a tablespoon across the six servings. A pinch per portion is closer to what most cooks want now.
- "Suppress the seeds"Means remove them; almost certainly a Gallicism from the French supprimer, of a kind common in the professional kitchen English of the period. The white ribs can be taken out at the same time.
- Peeling the peppersThree minutes in boiling water loosens the skin only on very thick-walled peppers, and it leaves them watery. Charring them whole under a broiler or over a flame until blackened, then steaming them covered for ten minutes, peels more reliably and adds flavour the blanched version does not have.
- Hot ovenPeriod usage for a "hot oven" falls somewhere around 400-450F. The half-minute appears to be there to set the top of the white without hardening the yolk.
- A very small frying panThe original gives no size; a pan of roughly six inches holds two eggs snugly so the whites do not spread away from the peppers. A larger pan means cooking four or six eggs at once and losing the neat individual portions.
- The pan must be ovenproofImplicit in the original, and the metal pans of a professional kitchen of this period would have been. Cast iron or carbon steel; nothing with a plastic handle.
- DonenessOne and a half minutes on the range plus thirty seconds in the oven gives a soft, barely set yolk. That is the intent of the dish, but it is not a fully cooked egg — worth knowing if you are cooking for anyone who should avoid them.
- YieldSix servings of two eggs each, using three peppers. The first plates will be cold before the sixth is fried unless you hold them in a warming oven, which is exactly what "keep warm" assumes.
Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) collected recipes from the professional kitchens he knew — he had cooked at Delmonico's in New York. Eggs fried on a bed of peeled, salted green peppers sits alongside Basque piperade and Spanish and Italian pepper-and-egg dishes, several of which begin the same way: skinning the pepper first, since the skin does not soften with brief cooking and lifts away after heat. The insistence on peeling, on a very small pan, and on sending the plates out "very hot" is restaurant discipline written down for domestic readers; the household cook is being asked to work like a line cook, one order at a time.