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Eggs with Cucumber
1/2 cupful stock 1 tablespoonful Crisco 3 eggs 1 large cucumber 1 cupful tomato sauce 1 tablespoonful tomato-pulp Salt and pepper to taste Peel cucumber, cut off ends and divide rest into two-inch pieces. Remove center portion of each with a cutter or small spoon. Place them in a Criscoed pan with stock; cover with greased paper and cook in oven till just tender. Great care must be taken so as not to break the shapes. Break eggs into saucepan, add Crisco and tomato pulp; season nicely and stir over fire until creamy and just set. Place cucumbers on hot platter and fill cavities with eggs. Cover with thick tomato sauce, and serve hot.
Sufficient for five pieces.
A neat Edwardian construction: braised cucumber barrels filled with soft scrambled egg and masked with tomato sauce. Two things decide whether it works — the cucumber must stay intact, and the eggs must stop short of firm.
- The hinge: stop the eggs earlyScramble over low heat and pull the pan while the mixture is still loose and glossy — "creamy and just set" is the instruction, and it is meant literally. They will carry on cooking in the hot cucumber cases and under the sauce, and overcooked egg will weep water into the tomato.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe only says "cook in oven till just tender." A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable reading, with the cucumbers likely wanting 15-20 minutes, until a knife tip slides in without resistance. Check early, since collapsed rings cannot be rescued.
- Greased paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment cut to the pan, buttered or oiled on one side and laid directly on the vegetables. It traps steam without letting the cucumber colour or dry out. Foil over the pan is a workable stand-in.
- CriscoCrisco was and is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and this book exists to sell it. Butter is better in both places here — a tablespoon in the eggs gives a far better set and flavour — with a neutral oil for greasing the pan.
- Cucumbers have changedCucumbers -- Varieties and growing conditions differed, and a modern supermarket cucumber can be wet and seedy; a hothouse or English cucumber tends to hold its shape better here. Salt the hollowed rings for ten minutes and pat dry to draw off some water before they go in the pan.
- Tomato pulp versus tomato sauceThe pulp stirred into the eggs is simply the seeded, chopped flesh of a fresh tomato, or thick passata reduced slightly. The cupful of sauce is a cooked, thickened tomato sauce, and it should be genuinely thick — a thin sauce will slide off the cucumbers and pool.
- StockHalf a cupful, used only as braising liquid. Chicken or a light vegetable stock; it should barely come up the sides of the cucumber pieces rather than submerge them.
- YieldFive pieces is a light supper for two, or a first course for three or four. One large cucumber gives about five two-inch sections once the ends are trimmed.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, who had introduced Crisco two years earlier as the first widely marketed hydrogenated cottonseed shortening. The book's job was to prove that the new fat could do everything lard and butter did, which is why Crisco turns up in dishes like this one where a period cook would simply have reached for butter. The dish itself is squarely in the Edwardian genteel-supper tradition: cooked cucumber, unfamiliar to many cooks now, was a standard English and American vegetable, braised or stewed and served hot, and hollowing it into cases to hold a filling was a common trick of the sort of tidy, shaped cookery that the professional kitchens of the day taught to domestic ones.