Creole Eggs
3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 tablespoonfuls flour 8 hard-cooked eggs 2 cupfuls tomato pulp Salt, pepper, and paprika to taste 1 small chopped onion 1 bay leaf 1 blade mace 2 cloves 2 tablespoonfuls chopped parsley Pinch of powdered thyme Slices of cooked ham
This is one of the terse Crisco entries that gives quantities and leaves the method to the cook's judgment. The dish is a spiced tomato sauce poured over halved hard-cooked eggs set on slices of ham.
- The implied methodCook the onion gently in the Crisco, stir in the flour to make a pale roux, add the tomato pulp and whole spices, and simmer 15-20 minutes until it coats a spoon. Season, strain or fish out the bay, mace and cloves, stir in the parsley, and pour over the eggs arranged on warmed ham.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 as hydrogenated cottonseed oil, and the whole reason this book exists. Modern all-vegetable shortening is the closest match; butter or a neutral oil will serve well enough here, since the fat is only carrying the roux.
- Tomato pulpNot juice and not whole canned tomatoes. Use passata or canned tomatoes pressed through a sieve to remove skin and seeds; two cupfuls is about 16 fl oz.
- Blade maceA piece of the dried aril from nutmeg, still sold whole in some spice shops. Substitute a scant quarter teaspoon of ground mace, or grate a little nutmeg, adding it toward the end so its aroma is not cooked away.
- Whole spices come outThe bay leaf, mace blade and two cloves are there to flavor the sauce, not to be eaten. Remove them before the sauce goes over the eggs.
- Hard-cooked eggsThe recipe specifies no timing beyond 'hard-cooked.' Twelve minutes off the boil, then straight into cold water, gives firm yolks that still cut clean; halve or quarter them lengthwise.
- HamAny cooked ham, sliced about a quarter inch thick and warmed in a dry pan. It supplies most of the salt, so taste the sauce after the ham is on the plate before adding more.
- YieldEight eggs and two cups of sauce serve four as a lunch or supper dish, over toast or rice.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, with recipes by Marion Harris Neil, to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had existed for only two years. The recipes in it are demonstrations that hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter, lard or suet, and here it does the plainest possible job: the fat for a roux. "Creole" in early twentieth-century American cookbooks was often used loosely, as shorthand for a sauce built on tomato with onion, sweet spice and a green herb, and it was attached to eggs, fish and chicken alike rather than always signalling a New Orleans source. The pairing of that sauce with hard-cooked eggs and ham sits in the same broad family as eggs cooked in tomato sauce found across the Mediterranean, and the mace and cloves are of a piece with older Anglo-American spicing.