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Scrambled Eggs, Pelligrini
Cut two ounces lean bacon in very small, thin pieces and place in a sautoire with teaspoon melted butter and briskly fry for five minutes, tossing once in a while. Peel two medium, sound, fresh, red tomatoes, cut them in eight pieces each, then add them to the bacon. Season with three saltspoons salt, two saltspoons pepper, and briskly cook for five minutes. Carefully crack eight fresh eggs into the sautoire over the bacon and tomatoes, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, pour over half gill cream, set them in the oven for five minutes. Remove, place on the range, then with a spoon gently mix the eggs with the tomatoes and bacon. Dress on a hot, deep dish and serve.
A skillet dish of eggs set over bacon and tomato, from the era when a cook was trusted to know when eggs were done. The measurements translate cleanly; the timings need judgment.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is 3/4 teaspoon and two is 1/2 teaspoon. Half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup.
- Total saltBetween the two seasonings the recipe adds roughly 1 1/4 teaspoons of salt to eight eggs, plus the bacon. Salt the vegetables and hold back on the eggs until you have tasted.
- The sautoireA straight-sided sauté pan with a metal handle, roughly 10 inches for this quantity. It has to go from stovetop to oven and back, so no plastic and no nonstick you would rather not heat empty.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the recipe does not name an oven setting of any kind. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, is a reasonable reading: hot enough to set the whites in a few minutes without turning the bottom layer rubbery before the top moves.
- The hinge: eggs go in wholeThe eggs are cracked in unbeaten and only broken up with a spoon at the end, after the pan comes out of the oven and back onto the range. The result is a mottled scramble with distinct streaks of white and yolk, not a uniform curd. Stirring at the start gives you a different dish.
- TomatoesFive minutes of brisk cooking will drive off some water, which helps keep the eggs from weeping. Winter supermarket tomatoes will not get there in that time; cook them until the pan looks dry, or use drained canned tomatoes.
- BaconTwo ounces of lean bacon cut small, started with a little butter because lean bacon renders little fat of its own. If your bacon is fatty, skip the butter and pour off the excess before the tomatoes go in.
- YieldEight eggs serves four generously as a lunch or supper dish, three at breakfast. Serve immediately in the hot deep dish specified; it carries on cooking in the pan.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and his cookbooks carry the house habit of attaching a patron's or colleague's name to a dish, which may well be what happened here. Who Pelligrini was is not recorded in the book. The dish itself needs no attribution: eggs set over stewed tomato with cured pork appear across the whole northern Mediterranean, from Basque piperade to the Neapolitan uova in purgatorio, and Filippini's version is essentially that idea worked into the American hotel-kitchen idiom, finished with cream and a brief turn in the oven so a single pan could go straight to the table.