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Scrambled Eggs, Montevideo
Cut three Spanish sweet peppers in small square pieces, place in a sautoir with a half ounce butter and cook for three minutes, then pour in two gills tomato sauce. Dilute a half saltspoon saffron in a teaspoon water and strain it into the pan, lightly mix, then let reduce to a third of the quantity. Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Briskly beat up with a fork for one minute, add to tomato and cook for six minutes, continually mixing with wooden spoon meanwhile. Prepare three pieces toast, trim off crusts, spread a teaspoon anchovy butter over each, cut each toast in two, place on a hot dish, dress eggs evenly over the six half toasts and serve.
A soft tomato-and-saffron scramble on anchovy toast, written in the measures of a professional kitchen around 1900. The proportions translate cleanly; the technique is where it stands or falls.
- The hinge: low heatSix minutes of constant stirring is the right length only over gentle heat. Eight eggs in a hot pan will set in ninety seconds and turn granular; keep the pan barely warm enough to thicken and pull it off while the mixture still looks slightly loose, since it carries on cooking on the dish.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of tomato sauce is one cup and half a gill of cream is a quarter cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: half a saltspoon of saffron is about an eighth of a teaspoon, and two saltspoons of pepper is half a teaspoon, which is assertive but deliberate.
- SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan. Any wide, heavy-bottomed skillet with sloping or straight sides works; the width matters more than the shape, since the eggs need surface area to cook evenly.
- Spanish sweet peppersMost likely pimientos, which are commonly sold jarred or canned, already roasted and peeled; the very short three-minute cooking suggests something already tender. Three of them is roughly a cup diced. If you use fresh red bell pepper instead, give it eight to ten minutes rather than three, as it will not be pre-cooked.
- Tomato sauceNot the modern jarred pasta sauce. A plain cooked tomato sauce of the period is meant, though the book's own version may well be built on a stock-and-mirepoix base; passata simmered with a little onion and butter is the nearest quick equivalent. Reducing the sauce well down, as the recipe directs, keeps the eggs from weeping.
- SaffronSteeping the threads in a teaspoon of water and straining extracts the colour and keeps stray filaments out of the eggs. Crumble the threads first and give them five minutes rather than a token dip.
- Anchovy butterSoftened butter mashed with anchovy fillets or paste, about one part anchovy to four parts butter. It is the seasoning of the dish as much as the salt, so do not skip it.
- YieldEight eggs over six half-slices of toast serves three generously or six as a first course.
The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), a vast compendium by the longtime chef of Delmonico's in New York. Filippini's habit, shared with the grand-hotel cooking of his generation, was to attach a place name to a garnish: once a formula was fixed, the name travelled with it. Montevideo here signals the Spanish-speaking Americas by way of sweet peppers, tomato and saffron rather than any documented Uruguayan original, and the anchovy butter under the eggs is pure Franco-American hotel practice. The dish belongs to the long list of composed scrambled eggs that filled breakfast, luncheon and supper menus of the period, when eggs were cheap and service was a la minute.