Home › Eggs › Parsley (Tablespoonfuls cream)
Parsley (Tablespoonfuls cream)
2 tablespoonfuls cream 1 tablespoonful chopped pimiento Salt and pepper to taste Select ripe tomatoes but do not have them too large; remove stems and cut each in halves crossways; remove cores and pips, and fry lightly in two tablespoonfuls Crisco. Have rounds of buttered toast a little larger than tomatoes. Beat eggs in small saucepan, add cream, pimientoes, rest of Crisco, seasonings, and stir over fire until creamy and just setting. Place each half tomato on round of toast, divide egg mixture into tomatoes, garnish with parsley and serve hot.
Eggs
The ingredient list has been clipped in the original printing — the eggs themselves, and the total quantity of Crisco, are missing from the top of the page even though both are called for in the method. Work from the proportions below.
- Reconstructing the quantitiesThe printed page gives no number of tomatoes and no egg count. Two tablespoonfuls of cream and one of chopped pimiento suit four to six eggs, so four eggs and two tomatoes cut in half is a workable reading. Two tablespoonfuls of Crisco go into the pan for the tomatoes; the "rest of Crisco" for the eggs is unquantified in the original — about another tablespoon.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, then new. Any neutral oil or butter works here; butter is better for the egg mixture, where the fat is tasted directly.
- Pips and cores"Pips" are the seeds. Scoop out seeds and the watery gel with a teaspoon so the shell holds the egg instead of flooding the toast.
- The hinge: pull the eggs early"Just setting" is the whole instruction. Take the pan off the heat while the curds still look slightly underdone and loose — they carry on cooking in the hot tomato shell and on the way to the table.
- Frying the tomatoesCut side down, over medium heat, two or three minutes only. They need to warm through and colour lightly; longer and the halves collapse and cannot be filled.
- PimientoSold by this date in small cans or jars, as it still is. Drain it well and chop fine, or the moisture thins the eggs. Jarred roasted red pepper is a close enough substitute.
- Toast roundsCut with a biscuit cutter a little wider than the tomato halves so nothing overhangs. Butter them while hot and assemble at the last moment, or they go soft.
- YieldThe original states no yield. Two tomatoes, halved, give four filled halves: a lunch or breakfast dish for two to four depending on what else is served.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with an entirely new product: vegetable fat, hydrogenated from cottonseed oil, that behaved like lard but came from no animal. Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, supplied the several hundred recipes, and the pattern here is typical: shortening written into every step where butter or lard would ordinarily stand. The dish itself belongs to the era's large family of egg-and-toast constructions, close kin to the many named "eggs on tomato" and shirred-egg preparations that filled breakfast and luncheon chapters; canned pimiento — Spanish seed is generally said to have reached Georgia around 1911, with the canning trade growing through the 1910s — was the standard flash of colour in such recipes.