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Poached Eggs in Tomato Sauce
Have a pint tomato sauce in a saucepan with half pint broth and when it thoroughly boils carefully crack in six fresh eggs at a time; poach for three minutes. Lift up with a skimmer and lay on freshly prepared toasts, two eggs on each. Prepare six more in exactly the same way and serve. Strain the tomato sauce in which the eggs were poached through a cheesecloth into a bowl, let get cold, and then return to the original jar with the others.
A restaurant method written for a kitchen with a stockpot and a standing jar of tomato sauce. Scaled down it is a fast supper, but two of the instructions need adjusting for a domestic stove and a domestic refrigerator.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe recipe says to crack the eggs in when the sauce "thoroughly boils," which works in a wide, deep pan of thin sauce where the eggs sink and the boil breaks. In a home saucepan a rolling boil will shred the whites before they set. Bring it up, then drop it to a bare tremble before the eggs go in and hold it there.
- Quantities and yieldA pint of tomato sauce and half a pint of broth is 2 cups plus 1 cup. Twelve eggs, two per toast, serves six.
- Consistency of the sauceThe broth is there to thin the sauce so the eggs can slip in and be lifted out cleanly. A modern jarred sauce is usually thicker than Filippini's and may need a little more liquid; you want something that coats a spoon but still ripples.
- Three minutesThree minutes at a low simmer gives a set white and a fully runny yolk, which is what was wanted. Add thirty to forty seconds if the eggs are straight from the refrigerator, and take them out on the early side since they carry on cooking on the toast.
- Six at a timeCrowding is the real risk. Six eggs in a two-quart saucepan will fuse; use the widest pan you have, or poach in batches of three or four and hold the finished ones on the toast in a low oven.
- The toastsThe recipe assumes the toast is ready before the eggs are: cut it to a size that will hold two eggs and make it first. A poached egg will not wait.
- Don't return the sauce to the jarThe last sentence is period practice and should be ignored. Sauce that has had raw eggs poached in it, then cooled on the counter and tipped back into a bulk container, is exactly the conditions food safety guidance now warns against. Cool any leftover sauce quickly, refrigerate it separately, and use it within a couple of days.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) is his attempt to set down a working repertoire gathered from many countries under one roof. Eggs poached directly in tomato sauce rather than in water is a Mediterranean habit with many local names: uova in purgatorio in southern Italy, eggs with piperade in the Basque country, and further east the family of dishes that includes shakshuka. Filippini's version is the restrained French-restaurant version of the idea, close to what nineteenth-century menus called oeufs pochés à la portugaise, where "portugaise" was standing shorthand for a tomato garnish. The closing instruction about straining the sauce and returning it to the jar tells you more about the book's setting than any of the cooking does: this is a professional kitchen where a pint of tomato sauce is drawn from a standing supply and nothing gets thrown away.