Mum's Eggs with Tomatoes

Some say you should fry the eggs first and pour sauce over them, the way you'd do with a fried-egg-on-toast breakfast. No — because that gives you two separate textures sitting next to each other, a fried egg and a sauce, when the whole point here is one unified, slightly thickened, almost risotto-like consistency where you can't quite tell where egg ends and tomato begins. The vigorous stirring is doing the same job a whisk does in a carbonara: using egg protein as a thickener for a sauce, not as a garnish sitting on top of it.

On shallot versus onion: a shallot is sweeter and milder than a regular onion, with less of that sulphurous sharpness, which matters in a dish with almost no other aromatics — no garlic, no herbs listed, nothing to hide behind. If you only have a regular onion, use half a small one and give it longer over gentle heat, because it needs more time to shed its bite than a shallot does. Red onion works too, though it will bleed a little colour into the sauce — harmless, just know it's there.

Tomato passata is simply tomatoes that have been strained smooth and usually lightly cooked down already — no skins, no seeds, no big tomato chunks to deal with. It's the right choice here because it goes straight into a hot pan and starts reducing immediately; a tin of whole or chopped tomatoes would need blending or a lot more time boiling down to get the same thick, pourable-but-not-watery base. If passata isn't in the cupboard, chopped tinned tomatoes blitzed smooth are the closest stand-in, just expect to simmer them a bit longer before the eggs go in — you want the sauce visibly thicker and darker red, not the bright thin orange of a just-opened tin.

The oil's job in step one is just a neutral medium for softening the shallot — "olive oil" here isn't asking for anything extra-virgin and precious, since it's about to be boiled hard with tomato and lose any delicate flavour anyway. Any oil with no strong smell of its own works: a light olive oil, a plain vegetable or sunflower oil, even the butter from later split into two portions if you'd rather not buy a separate bottle for this.

Parmesan and butter are both finishing fats — one salty and savoury, one rich and rounding. Parmesan's hard, aged, intensely salty character is what lets a small amount season the whole pan; a soft young cheese would just melt into stringy nothing without adding the same punch. If you're out of Parmesan, a strong hard cheese like a mature Cheddar or Grana Padano does similar work — just taste your salt again afterwards, since hard cheeses vary a lot in how salty they are. Butter at the end isn't there for cooking at all; it's there to coat the sauce in a bit of shine and silkiness, the same reason a risotto gets a knob of butter stirred in right before serving and not at the start.

Four eggs for one person sounds like a lot until you remember they're not frying whole — they're dissolving into 400ml of sauce, so the yield is really "sauce for one hungry person with toast," not "four eggs on a plate." If that's too much food, halving everything keeps the ratios honest; don't just drop to two eggs with the full 400ml, or you'll have a thin tomato soup with egg flecks in it rather than the dense, custardy sauce you're after.

Patience sits mainly in two places: letting the shallot actually turn gold rather than staying raw-white, and giving the full stir time rather than snatching it off heat the moment the eggs look "done enough." Ten minutes of steady stirring is the lower bound, not a target to beat — judge it by the sauce thickening around the spoon and clinging rather than running off it. And since there's a British kitchen behind this: toasted bread for dipping matters as much as the sauce itself, so pick a bread sturdy enough to hold its shape when it goes in — a good crusty white loaf or sourdough toasts and holds up far better than soft supermarket sliced bread, which tends to collapse the second it meets a wet sauce.