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Poached Eggs, Saragosse
Cut in small square pieces half a Spanish onion and one sound green pepper, place in small saucepan with a tablespoon melted butter and lightly fry six minutes. Add three finely chopped, peeled, fresh red tomatoes and one gill tomato sauce. Season with three saltspoons salt, three saltspoons sugar and two saltspoons pepper, then boil ten minutes. Cut from a stale loaf of sandwich bread six quarter-inch-thick slices, cut each slice in two even square pieces, and toast them a nice golden colour. Lightly butter with a little anchovy butter. Arrange on a hot dish. Place twelve poached eggs on top, pour the sauce over and serve.
A Delmonico-style egg dish built on a quick Spanish sofrito. The measurements are turn-of-the-century restaurant shorthand, and the timing on the eggs is left entirely to the cook.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the seasoning is 3/4 teaspoon salt, 3/4 teaspoon sugar and 1/2 teaspoon pepper. A gill is half a cup of tomato sauce.
- Tomato sauce, not ketchupThe gill of "tomato sauce" most likely means a cooked tomato sauce of the kitchen's own making rather than anything jarred with garlic and basil; something like passata reduced with a little stock will stand in. Keep it smooth and lightly seasoned so the salt and sugar quantities still make sense.
- The sugar is doing workThree saltspoons of sugar against three of salt looks odd, but sugar was often used to correct early-season or under-ripe tomatoes. Taste before adding all of it; ripe summer tomatoes may need half or none.
- Anchovy butterMash 2-3 oil-packed anchovy fillets into 3 tablespoons softened butter. It is the seasoning link between the bland toast and the sweet sauce, and skipping it flattens the dish.
- Poach the eggs lastTwelve eggs at once is a lot of coordination. Poach them ahead into cold water, then reheat 30-40 seconds in hot salted water just before assembling; whites set, yolks still liquid.
- Toast timingThe croutons are buttered with anchovy butter and immediately covered in sauce, so toast them dark enough to hold up. Stale bread, as specified, absorbs less and stays firmer than fresh.
- YieldTwelve croutons and twelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper course, two eggs each.
"Saragosse" is the French spelling of Zaragoza, the Aragonese city, and the name signals Spain rather than any documented local dish: onion, green pepper and tomato stewed in fat is the sofrito that underlies much of Spanish cooking, and its close cousin pisto is eaten across Aragon, Navarre and La Mancha, often with eggs set into it. Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, assembled The International Cook Book (1906) as a tour of national styles rendered in the French restaurant idiom he had spent his career in, which is why a Spanish vegetable base arrives here on buttered croutons with poached eggs on top, in the manner of eggs Benedict and its many hotel-menu relatives. The anchovy butter is a French flourish, the sort of seasoned compound butter a professional kitchen of the period would have had to hand.