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Scrambled Eggs with Sweet Peppers
Cut three Spanish sweet peppers into quarter-inch square pieces, place in a frying pan with a tablespoon butter and gently cook for five minutes; crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half a gill of milk, season with half teaspoon salt and one saltspoon white pepper. Sharply beat up for one minute, then pour the eggs over the peppers, mix well with the wooden spoon and cook for six minutes, very frequently, in fact almost continually, stirring them. Dress on a hot deep dish and serve.
A plain scramble whose only trick is heat control: the six-minute cook time in the original only works over a genuinely low flame with constant stirring.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup — about 2 tablespoons per four eggs. That is generous but not wrong for a soft, loose scramble.
- A saltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. With half a teaspoon of salt for eight eggs, the seasoning here is restrained by modern taste; season again at the table.
- Spanish sweet peppersThe recipe gives no colour or variety. Most likely a fleshy sweet type rather than the long green frying pepper sold today as an Italian sweet pepper; a red bell pepper or a jar of pimientos stands in well. Five minutes in butter softens diced bell pepper only partway; give it eight to ten if you want it tender rather than crisp.
- The six minutesSix minutes of stirring makes sense only over low heat, which is what the near-continuous stirring implies. Over a modern burner on medium the eggs will be dry and grainy in half that time. Keep the flame low and pull the pan off the heat while the curds still look slightly underdone.
- The wooden spoonSpecified for a reason: it moves the mass without shearing it into fine grains. A silicone spatula that scrapes the pan bottom does the same job better.
- Beating "sharply for one minute"A full minute of hard beating aerates the eggs and gives a lighter, more uniform curd. Do not skip to a lazy fork-stir if you want the texture the book intends.
- The hot deep dishWarm the serving dish; softly scrambled eggs chill fast and continue cooking in their own heat, so a cold platter both cools them and does nothing to stop carryover. Eight eggs serves four at breakfast, three if it is the main dish.
The International Cook Book sits in the company of the Spanish and Basque egg-and-pepper preparations — the family that includes piperade and Spanish revuelto de pimientos — where sweet peppers stewed in fat are bound with beaten egg rather than being merely a garnish. The specification of "Spanish sweet peppers" points to a period when such peppers were often sold canned or bottled as pimientos; fresh bell peppers were a seasonal and regional item well into the century. The insistence on constant stirring and a wooden spoon is professional French practice, in which scrambled eggs were judged on softness rather than on being set.