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Scrambled Eggs, with Tomatoes
Peel and cut into small square pieces two medium red tomatoes. Place them in a stewpan with one tablespoon melted butter. Season with two saltspoons salt, one saltspoon white pepper and two saltspoons sugar; toss them well and cook for five minutes.
Prepare the same amount scrambled eggs add the tomatoes to the eggs in the pan, stir well for one minute and serve.
A two-pan breakfast dish that stands or falls on how wet the tomatoes are and how gently the eggs are cooked. Reduce the tomatoes properly first and the rest is easy.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the tomatoes take 1/2 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp white pepper and 1/2 tsp sugar — the sugar is there to balance the acid, not to sweeten.
- "The same amount" of eggsThe original is genuinely vague: it means roughly the same volume of scrambled egg as cooked tomato. Two medium tomatoes, peeled and seeded, will cook down to something under a cup, so somewhere around four eggs is a reasonable reading — enough for two.
- StewpanSimply a straight-sided saucepan. Use a wide skillet instead so the tomato liquid evaporates rather than pools.
- PeelingScore the skins, drop the tomatoes in boiling water for 20-30 seconds, then into cold water and the peels slip off. Squeeze out the seeds and jelly as well, or the eggs will weep.
- Five minutes is a minimumCook the tomatoes until they look jammy and no watery liquid runs when you draw a spoon through the pan. Modern greenhouse tomatoes can be wetter than the fruit this recipe assumes and may want eight to ten minutes.
- Egg techniqueScramble over low heat, stirring constantly, and pull the pan off while the curds are still glossy and loose. They will set further when the hot tomato goes in.
- Order of operationsAdd the tomato to the eggs, as written, not the reverse; the eggs are already scrambled at that stage and the tomato only needs folding through. One minute of stirring is enough.
- Canned tomatoesDrained canned tomatoes work out of season. Chop them, skip the peeling, and expect to cook them longer to drive off the packing liquid.
Eggs cooked with softened tomato belong to a broad Mediterranean family — Basque piperade, Spanish and Provençal versions with peppers and garlic, Levantine dishes of eggs poached in tomato — and dishes of the kind appear in European cookbooks of the period. What marks this one as a professional's recipe is the separation of the two elements: the tomatoes are seasoned and reduced on their own, then folded into eggs that have been scrambled apart, rather than everything being cooked together in one pan. That is restaurant discipline, and it produces a cleaner dish. The pinch of sugar with the salt and white pepper reads as a correction for the sharpness of cooked tomato, and white pepper may have been preferred here to avoid dark flecks in a pale dish.