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Hard-Boiled Eggs with Tomato Sauce
Boil twelve fresh eggs for eight minutes, plunge in cold water for a minute, remove, shell, then cut them in halves lengthwise. Reduce a half pint tomato sauce in a saucepan to about a gill, add eggs to tomato sauce with a half teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Mix well, cook for five minutes, transfer them into a deep dish and serve.
A plain dish of halved hard-boiled eggs warmed in a heavily reduced tomato sauce. The only real technique is the reduction — get that wrong and the dish is watery.
- A gillIn US measure a gill is half a cup (4 fl oz); in imperial measure it is 5 fl oz. Either way, a half pint reduced to a gill is a reduction by half, giving a thick, spoon-coating sauce rather than a pouring one.
- Egg timingEight minutes of boiling gives a set but still slightly moist yolk in a large egg. The cold-water minute is most likely there to loosen the shells rather than to chill the eggs through; shelling while still warm tends to peel more cleanly.
- Handle the halves gently"Mix well" is the original's weak point — stirred vigorously the yolks crumble out and cloud the sauce. Lay the halves cut side up in the reduced sauce and spoon it over instead.
- Five minutes is enoughThe eggs are already cooked; the five minutes only warms them and marries the flavours. Longer and the whites turn rubbery.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon each of salt and pepper for twelve eggs is modest, and depends entirely on whether the tomato sauce was already seasoned. Taste the reduced sauce before adding anything.
- Tomato sauceThis means a cooked, seasoned tomato sauce of the kind given elsewhere in books of this period, not ketchup and not raw purée. Passata simmered down with a little onion and butter is the closest quick equivalent.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a light main course or eight to ten as a first course. Serve with bread or over rice; the dish is soft and needs something with texture.
Hard-boiled eggs finished in a sauce were a workhorse of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century cookery, filling the meatless slot on menus for Fridays, Lent, and thrifty weekdays alike. French kitchen writing of the period lists dozens of variations — œufs durs with cream sauce, with sorrel, with curry, with tomato — and this is the tomato version, pared back to essentials. The reliance on a pre-made sauce is itself characteristic: the classical French system these books borrowed from assumed a cook had base sauces ready and built dishes by reducing and combining them, so a recipe like this reads as an assembly instruction rather than a full set of directions.