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Scrambled Eggs, Henry
Plunge a sound green pepper in boiling water for two minutes, take out, pull off skin with a coarse towel, remove seeds and finely mince. Cut two ounces raw lean ham in thin julienne strips, place in a sautoire with a tablespoon of butter and fry for five minutes, tossing once in a while. Add two medium, seeded, peeled, finely chopped tomatoes, season with a half teaspoon salt and cook six minutes, gently tossing meanwhile. Break eight fresh eggs over, season with a half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, and set in oven for five minutes. Remove, place sautoire on range, mix eggs and ingredients thoroughly, dress on a hot dish and serve.
A pepper-ham-tomato scramble finished in the oven, from the era when a hotel range had a hot box above it and eggs were set rather than stirred. The technique is closer to a Basque pipérade than to a modern scramble.
- The hinge: cook the vegetables dryThe ham, pepper and tomato should lose most of their liquid before the eggs go in, or the finished dish weeps. Six minutes of tossing over decent heat drives off much of the tomato juice; a wetter pan may need longer.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow sauté pan, not a saucepan and not a casserole dish. Anything ovenproof with a wide base and 2-3 inch sides works; the width matters more than the material.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, which is typical of professional books of the period that assumed a working range. Moderate, around 325-350F, gets eight eggs to a soft set in roughly the five minutes stated; hotter and the bottom curdles before the top moves.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of pepper is therefore a half teaspoon, which is assertive but correct for eight eggs and cured ham.
- Raw lean hamThis means uncooked ham, either fresh leg or a dry-cured piece such as prosciutto or country ham, cut in matchsticks and fried. Ordinary pink deli ham is already cooked and will simply dry out; use a dry-cured ham and cut the added salt accordingly.
- Peeling the pepperTwo minutes in boiling water loosens the skin enough to rub off with a rough cloth. Charring over a flame and steaming in a covered bowl does the same job faster and adds flavour the blanching does not.
- The final mixThe eggs come out of the oven only partly set and are stirred together on the stovetop, so they finish as large soft curds streaked with the garnish rather than a uniform omelette. Pull the pan when the centre still looks loose; carryover heat does the rest.
- YieldEight eggs serves four generously as a main course, six as part of a larger breakfast.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, and the naming follows the pattern of the American hotel and club kitchens Filippini worked in, above all Delmonico's in New York: a standard preparation given a proper name to mark whose order, or whose taste, fixed that particular version. Scores of such eponyms fill the book, though who most of them honoured goes unrecorded. The dish itself is a close cousin of the Basque and Spanish pipérade, in which peppers, tomato and cured ham are stewed down and bound with beaten egg. The oven-then-stir method reflects the equipment: a coal or gas range with a warm oven made it easy to set a large pan of eggs gently and evenly, which is harder to do over a single burner with eight eggs at once.