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Poached Eggs, Barcelone
Prepare a Creole sauce and keep hot until required. Cut six Spanish sweet peppers in halves and fry in a frying pan with one tablespoon melted butter for two minutes on each side, lift up and keep on a plate. Prepare twelve poached eggs on toast, arrange a piece of the pepper on top of each egg, pour sauce over and serve.
A composed egg dish that assumes you already have a Creole sauce on the stove; the original is really an assembly instruction. Everything hinges on having the sauce hot and the eggs cooked to order.
- The Creole sauce is not on this pageIn books of this era it means tomatoes cooked down with onion, green pepper, celery and a little garlic, seasoned with bay, thyme and cayenne, often thickened with a butter-and-flour roux. Make about 2 cups; it should coat the eggs, not flood the plate.
- Spanish sweet peppersThese are most likely pimientos — squat, thick-walled, sweeter and softer than a bell pepper. Jarred whole roasted pimientos work and need only a brief turn in the butter to warm through; fresh red bell pepper is the usual substitute, and will want longer than two minutes a side to soften.
- Poaching waterHold the water at a bare tremble, around 180-190F, with a tablespoon of vinegar and no salt. Three minutes gives a set white and a liquid yolk; fresher eggs hold their shape without any swirling.
- Work orderSauce first and kept warm, peppers second and held on the plate as directed, eggs last. Poached eggs stiffen and weep within a couple of minutes, so toast and plate while they cook.
- ToastCut rounds or trim the crusts so the egg covers the bread; untrimmed slices go soggy at the edges under the sauce. Butter them lightly.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper dish, or twelve as one course of a longer meal. Halving it is straightforward.
- Soft yolksThe yolks are deliberately runny. If serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, use pasteurized shell eggs.
Poached eggs on toast were the workhorse of the early-twentieth-century breakfast and luncheon card, and here they are dressed with sweet peppers and a tomato sauce to read as Spanish. The Creole sauce underneath is itself a New Orleans idiom with Spanish and French antecedents, so the pairing was less arbitrary to the author than it looks — tomato, onion and sweet pepper carried a similar signal in a professional kitchen whether the menu said Creole or Portugaise. The peppers are probably pimientos, which Spain was canning and exporting by the early twentieth century.