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Eggs in Tomatoes
Cut the stem end from a number of firm tomatoes, allowing one to each person. Scoop out the seeds and turn them upside down to drain. Dust each with salt, pepper and chopped parsley and carefully drop in a raw egg. On the egg drop a bit of butter and salt, white pepper; arrange the tomatoes in a shallow pan, well buttered and place in a very hot oven until the eggs are set.
A straightforward baked egg dish that depends almost entirely on the fit between egg and tomato. Nothing here is unsafe; the difficulties are structural.
- Oven heatThe recipe asks only for "a very hot oven." Period usage for that phrase is generally taken as somewhere around 450-500F, but the book itself gives no figure. Expect the eggs to take on the order of 12 to 18 minutes, depending on how thick-walled the tomatoes are.
- Choose the tomato by volumeA large egg is about 3 tablespoons. Test a hollowed tomato with water first: if it holds less than that, the white will overflow and weld itself to the pan. Beefsteak or large slicing tomatoes work; small round ones do not.
- Drain properlyInverting the shells for ten minutes is the step people skip, and the result is watery egg. Salt the insides lightly first to draw moisture out, then blot with paper towel.
- Keep them uprightThe original says only to arrange the tomatoes in a well-buttered shallow pan. A muffin tin, or a snug baking dish with the tomatoes touching, is more reliable -- a tipped tomato loses the whole egg.
- Crack the egg into a cup firstDropping a raw egg straight into a narrow cavity often breaks the yolk against the tomato wall. Slide it in from a small cup or ramekin instead.
- Judging donenessPull them when the white is opaque and just firm and the yolk still trembles; carryover heat in the tomato continues cooking for a minute or two after they leave the oven. For a fully set yolk, add about five minutes.
- White pepperThe recipe specifies white pepper on the egg, plausibly so that it does not show; black pepper tastes much the same here but will show as flecks.
- YieldOne tomato per person, as stated. They are best served straight from the oven.
Baked eggs in a vegetable case were a standing feature of late-Victorian cookery. By the 1890s tomatoes appear everywhere in household cookbooks — stewed, scalloped, stuffed with breadcrumbs, and hollowed as containers like this. The technique is the same one applied to green peppers, large mushrooms and hollowed rolls in the same chapters, and it runs parallel to the French oeufs en cocotte and to the modern habit of baking eggs in halved avocados. The instruction to dust with chopped parsley before the egg goes in, rather than after, puts the seasoning underneath.