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Fried Eggs with Sweet Peppers
Cut six sweet Spanish peppers into halves. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, add the peppers and fry for two minutes on one side only; turn, carefully crack twelve fresh eggs over them, evenly sprinkle over half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper and fry for one minute on the range, then set in the oven for five minutes. Remove, carefully glide them on a large hot dish and serve.
A one-pan supper dish that stands or falls on the pan: it goes from burner to oven, so it must be ovenproof and wide enough to hold twelve eggs in a single layer.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon. With the half teaspoon of salt, that is a light hand for twelve eggs; taste and adjust at the table.
- Sweet Spanish peppersThese are the thick-walled, sweet red peppers of the pimiento and bell type, not anything hot. Halve them lengthwise and strip out core, seeds and white ribs before they go in the butter.
- Two minutes is not enough for the peppersThe recipe gives the halves two minutes on one side only, then turns them and cracks the eggs straight over, so the second side gets almost no cooking. Halved thick peppers will still be raw and squeaky. Give them longer over moderate heat, or roast and peel them first, before the eggs go over the top.
- The panTwo tablespoons of butter, twelve pepper halves and twelve eggs need the widest ovenproof skillet or shallow gratin pan you have, and may want two pans to keep the eggs in one layer. A modern nonstick surface makes the final glide onto the platter possible; in a bare pan, be generous with the butter.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A hot oven of about 400F for five minutes will set the whites while leaving the yolks soft.
- Egg donenessFive minutes at that heat leaves runny yolks. Anyone avoiding undercooked egg should hold the dish in the oven until the yolks are firm, at the cost of the loose yolk that makes the dish.
- Cracking the eggsBreak each egg into a cup first and slide it into a gap between the pepper halves. Cracking twelve eggs directly over a hot pan guarantees at least one broken yolk and a piece of shell.
- YieldTwelve eggs and six peppers serve six as a main course at breakfast or lunch, with bread to catch the yolk.
Alexander Filippini, long the cook at Delmonico's in New York, published The International Cook Book in 1906, and this dish appears in it. Eggs fried or baked over sweet peppers and their fat are common to the whole western Mediterranean, from Basque piperade to the Spanish and Provencal pepper dishes that share the same logic: sweet peppers softened in fat, eggs set on top, everything served from the pan. What marks the recipe as a professional's is the finish, the eggs slid whole onto a hot platter rather than dished out, a restaurant habit that assumes a well-seasoned pan and a steady wrist. The white pepper rather than black is also a kitchen convention of the period, often said to be meant to keep dark specks off the whites.