An Egg Cooked in a Hole in a Slice of Bread

[RWells]

Boy, is this ever a blast from my childhood. My culinary challenged father would make us this breakfast about once a month (other than a random attempt at grilling it was his only effort toward cooking) and he called it a "One Eyed Egyptian Sandwich". The fact that no one else has come up with this name vindicates my suspicion that he made up the name out of whole cloth.

I've got some wonderful homemade Pullman bread and free range eggs and I know what I'm having for breakfast tomorrow.

[tim]

Hi,

Mom called them"Hollywood eggs", don't know why.

I now cook bacon in a French black steel pan before adding the bread to toast on one side in the bacon fat, flip and add the egg. Had them yesterday.

Good bacon is really a hard find these days. Farmland thick hickory smoked bacon is pretty good for reasonable money.

Tim

[chezcherie]

Hi,

Mom called them"Hollywood eggs", don't know why.

I now cook bacon in a French black steel pan before adding the bread to toast on one side in the bacon fat, flip and add the egg.  Had them yesterday.

Good bacon is really a hard find these days.  Farmland thick hickory smoked bacon is pretty good for reasonable money.

Tim

←

oooh. i have some gorgeous peppered bacon in my fridge, and my hens are laying. i'm so trying this tomorrow. (and to bring the "hollywood" into the mix, i'm attending a fancy-schmancy premiere for a movie my bro-in-law wrote and directed in hwd tomorrow night, so the shoe fits!)

i love the baconfat idea!!!

[andiesenji]

Ham fat is good also. I often use browned butter - make a batch ahead of time and coat both sides of the bread prior to cutting the hole with a biscuit cutter - size appropriate to the size of the egg. (Have a set of the Ateco cutters) The nutty flavor of the browned butter is a wonderful complement to eggs.

I tried the two-egg version in a slice of sheepherder bread and used my jumbo turner. I cooked it on the griddle with the temp cranked up all the way and it took a bit over a minute on each side. Sadly, I didn't think to take photos. Maybe next time.

I'm going to be in Phoenix(Tempe) the first week in September, and I intend to check out a couple of places that I have been told serve this breakfast item.

Edited August 5, 2009 by andiesenji (log)

[TheFoodTutor]

I don't pre-butter the toast, I butter the pan.

←

Thank you! I was hoping someone would point this out. As someone who lived without a toaster for years and years - for no particular reason, other than that I needed room for my rice cooker, my ice cream maker and numerous other appliances - I'm very used to lubricating the pan to make toast.

So, I didn't grow up with this dish, and I'm not sure what to call it in my own personal experience, but I first heard it called Toad in the Hole, and that was on a television show. I think it was a Louisiana cooking show, if it matters, but I grew up in Ohio.

When I first saw the idea for the dish, it instantly occurred to me that, since I like my eggs up, and yet I also like my toast crisp on both sides, I should cut the hole with a cookie cutter, toast the bread in the pan on one side, flip, then pour in the egg.

Throwing away the hole from the middle of the bread never seemed like a good option to me.

Edited to add: I don't cover, and yet I also don't flip the egg. I find it pretty easy to cook the egg enough, sunny side up, without flipping or covering. Any runny whites seem to get absorbed by the sides of the hole cut in the bread, and I do like my egg yolks pretty darned runny.

As someone who totally ruined my first fried egg on the stove, made for my father at age 12, because a bubble of fat and air under the egg made the egg literally explode on me, I think this is pretty much a great way to idiot-proof making a fried egg.

Damn. Now I want to make this for breakfast. Would schmaltz be a good addition? I don't have any bacon today.

Edited August 7, 2009 by TheFoodTutor (log)

[andiesenji]

Damn. Now I want to make this for breakfast. Would schmaltz be a good addition? I don't have any bacon today.

←

I've tried all kinds of fats but never schmaltz. For some reason schmaltz gives me heartburn - I used to use it when I prepared chopped chicken liver but no more, I use duck fat.

At times I do put the butter in the pan and toast the bread in it.

However when I am cooking on a griddle, I prefer to butter the bread itself.

Never have thrown away the middles, that would be like throwing away the donut hole rounds.

Other fats used: bacon drippings, sausage drippings, ham fat, lard, ghee, coconut oil, olive oil, and duck fat, which is really tasty.

Besides bacon drippings, I often oil a pan or griddle with the fat side of the bacon rind as I generally buy a slab and cut my own.

[nibor]

I'm still sticking to "Gas-house eggs" but apparently this is one dish that has had an infinite variety of names.

←

What is a "Gas-house", and why would such a house have these type of eggs?

[andiesenji]

I'm still sticking to "Gas-house eggs" but apparently this is one dish that has had an infinite variety of names.

←

What is a "Gas-house", and why would such a house have these type of eggs?

←

Go back to page 3 of this thread and scroll down to post #81. I posted links to sites that explain where the name appears to have originated.

[KD1191]

Boy, is this ever a blast from my childhood.  My culinary challenged father would make us this breakfast about once a month (other than a random attempt at grilling it was his only effort toward cooking) and he called it a "One Eyed Egyptian Sandwich".  The fact that no one else has come up with this name vindicates my suspicion that he made up the name out of whole cloth. 

←

Well, unless we're related I don't think he made it up. My mom (born and raised in rural Montana) also called this a One Eyed Egyptian Sandwich. When I started reading this thread and didn't see anyone else mentioning that name, I assumed she'd made it up, but then turned to Google and found a recipe under that name here.

[Gekkani]

Now I haven't had one of these since I was a kid, but we always called them "Spit in the Ocean"

[Kouign Aman]

...we always called them "Eggs in a Frame."

←

My husband grew up (arizona) calling it that: "Egg in a frame".

Since he cooks most breakfasts, that's the name being perpetuated in our house.

I got the recipe from a novel when I was a kid (Southern California, some 30+ years back), where it was called a Goldmine sandwich.

Over the years I've used pert near everything to cut out that hole: knife, upside down glass, cookie cutters,

My daughter insists on the heart-shaped cookie cutter.

I find it works best to butter one side of the bread, cut the hole, fry the bread, add butter to pan, flip bread, add egg. That's because herself insists on extremely runny yolks.

For the rest of the world, its ok to add the egg before flipping.

[Kouign Aman]

Fry-ups in my house when I was growing up was bacon, eggs, fried tomatoes, fried mushrooms, fried bread - oh my there are tears in my eyes.

←

Amen, sister. I see we come from a similarly culinary breakfast background. Fried bread. :ah!:

I used to keep the little fried circles/hearts from the frames, and snarf them myself, til the munchkin caught on and demanded her rightful due.

[harlanturk]

Actually photographed one for the Spring 2009 cover of Edible Brooklyn

[technogypsy]

I've never seen it not flipped. It's hard to imagine how that would work. Both sides of the bread need to come in contact with the pan in order to cook/toast/griddle properly.

←

My mother grilled one side of the toast, flipped it, and then added the egg. You want it runny so it soaks into the bread when you eat it. The boys now call it Grandma's toast.

Since I'm originally from NE, I learned it as "toad in a hole". Scouts in Texas call it one eyed jack.

[Werdna]

My dad grew up durring the depression, and when I was young he called them vulcanized eggs, and explained that the bread was so you could cook it on your car's engine block without it running off.

[misstenacity]

A former co-worker of mine who had an aversion to both runny eggs and the cook at our employer's cafeteria/kitchen called it: "Salmonella Surprise".

*grin*

[Jacqueline Clemens]

This came up the other day when I cooked breakfast for my wife.

I made the dish where you cut the center out of a slice of bread and fry the bread with an egg in the hole that was cut out at the same time.  My wife had never seen or heard of this.  She grew up in SC and OH.

My Mom, who grew up in the South, never really made this, but I saw it in the mess halls as an army brat kid called Sunrise Breakfast since it was always sunny side up eggs.

Do you know this dish?  What did you call it and where did you grow up?

←

"Toad in a hole"! It's gotta be flipped for a quick cook on the other side or...yucky raw egg white!

[ravensfeast]

Egg in a Basket (PNW/CA)

We would call it Egg with a Hat often though because of the cute cut-out circular "hat" we put on top of it.

[RachelJoy]

"Sesame Egg" is what we called it. I grew up in Newton, MA, just west of Boston. No idea where the name came from. I'll have to ask my mother.

[DTBarton]

We always called it a firehouse egg.

Allan

←

Growing up, it was called a gashouse egg at our house. Seems similar to firehouse egg.

Wife did a Google on it and came up with a little credibility (not that any other names aren't credible, except maybe that toad one).

Recent Saveur article: http://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Gashouse-Eggs

Explanation of name: http://www.of2minds.org/spice/archives/000306.html

Edited August 26, 2009 by DTBarton (log)

[kmcg]

Another vote for Eggs in a Frame. Grew up in Idaho, but like Snowangel, I learned this one in the Betty Crocker children's cookbook. My kids love it, especially with the heart cookie cutter. We're flippers, without a doubt.

[John Hammond]

I first saw this in 1989 in a long gone restaurant in Camden, Maine (Mamma and Leenie's) where it was called "egg in a frame". They used thick sliced "texas toast" bread and cooked it in bacon fat easy over with the cut out round grilled alongside and served on top of the egg. The family that ran the place was from California.

[barbjack]

This came up the other day when I cooked breakfast for my wife.

I made the dish where you cut the center out of a slice of bread and fry the bread with an egg in the hole that was cut out at the same time.  My wife had never seen or heard of this.  She grew up in SC and OH.

My Mom, who grew up in the South, never really made this, but I saw it in the mess halls as an army brat kid called Sunrise Breakfast since it was always sunny side up eggs.

Do you know this dish?  What did you call it and where did you grow up?

←

This is definitely called "angels on horseback" in my family!

[andiesenji]

I recently had a long conversation with Arnie Niebold (age 91) whose farther and grandfather owned a deli in the old Gashouse district of New York (razed to make way for Stuyvesant Town in the late 1940s).

It was called the Gashouse district because during the first three decades of the 20th century the area contained a large (and leaky) gas distribution works and the smells were awful so it wasn't considered a very good place to live but was mostly populated by lower class working Americans.

Many of the houses had small backyards and they kept chickens so eggs were fairly plentiful.

The workingmen who left for work very early in the mornings would carry the bread with them to street vendors who would cut the hole, fry the bread, add an egg and cook it till it was hard - none of the runny yolk business we like. The resulting "sandwich" was wrapped in paper and carried to work.

Arnie says that most of the street vendors had small pushcarts that had just enough room for a small brazier topped by a square metal plate and they often got their fuel by stealing from the coal wagons that trundled around the streets. As a small boy in the 1920s he remembers being spanked for trading a small piece of ham from the deli for one of the "gashouse eggs" because the man wrapped it in newspaper and Arnie got the ink all over his face and his school shirt and tie.

After the family business was displaced in the late '40s, they relocated to Stapleton, Staten Island where they stayed in business until 1974 (Arnie's Deli) when the family relocated to California.

I thought "Angels on Horseback" were oysters or scallops wrapped with bacon and then broiled.

[gregnz]

At home in New Zealand, we called them "American Fried" eggs, although this was not the universal term, and not everyone was familiar with the style.

The bread was cut with an upturned drinking glass, buttered, then fried the first side. When crunchy and brown, the bread is flipped and the egg broken into it. The yolk should be runny and served with the "lid" on the top.