Home › Roasts and Second Courses › Scrambled Eggs
Scrambled Eggs
(Uova strapazzate) Break the eggs in a plate, assuring first that they are all fresh.
Melt in a saucepan a piece of butter about as big as an egg. When it is melted pour the egg and scramble them with a fork on a low fire. 2 When the eggs are cooked season moderately with salt and butter. Just when you take them away from the fire and before serving add a ta blespoonful of milk or liquid cream. Serve hot with a little grated cheese.
The scrambled eggs can be served with points of asparagus, truffles, mushrooms, etc. which are prepared just as if they were to go in an omelet.
PART II
A plain Italian treatment of scrambled eggs, notable for how much butter it uses and how little it does to the eggs. The instructions assume a cook who already knows the pan should barely be warm.
- The hinge: keep the heat low"Low fire" is not a suggestion here. Eggs set into curds somewhere around 145-160F, and a hot pan drives them past that into rubber and weeping liquid before you can stir. Keep the pan just warm enough that the eggs thicken slowly, and pull them while they still look slightly underdone.
- Butter "as big as an egg"A standard period measure for roughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. That is generous but deliberate: the fat is what keeps the curds soft. There is no need to reduce it much if you want the texture the recipe intends.
- No egg count is givenThe original leaves the quantity to the cook. Two ounces of butter would suit perhaps six to eight eggs; the number and the yield are a modern estimate, not anything the book states.
- Butter twiceSalt and a second addition of butter come once the eggs are cooked. Taken with the low heat, this reads as enriching butter rather than frying fat, though the recipe does not say whether the pan has left the fire.
- The spoonful of milk or creamAdded just off the fire and before serving, as the recipe directs. Have it ready beforehand so it can go in the moment the pan comes off.
- The grated cheeseMost likely a hard grating cheese of the parmesan type, grated fine. The recipe has it going on at serving rather than being stirred through.
- The garnishesAsparagus tips, mushrooms and truffles should be cooked separately and folded in warm at the end, exactly as for an omelet. Raw mushrooms or asparagus released into the eggs will water them down.
- FreshnessThe instruction to break the eggs onto a plate first and check them is worth keeping. It costs nothing and saves a whole pan from one bad egg.
This is from Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919), one of a number of English-language volumes published in America to introduce Italian home cooking to an American readership. Strapazzate comes from strapazzare, to mistreat or knock about roughly, and is the ordinary Italian word for scrambled eggs. The finish with grated cheese and the list of interchangeable garnishes handled "just as if they were to go in an omelet" both point to a domestic kitchen working from a small repertoire of methods rather than a fixed set of dishes.