Vintage Recipe Roulette: "Sunday Night Quickie" from a Florida bank's 1981 employee cookbook
The question of which came first is dwarfed by the question of why chicken soup and scrambled eggs are in the same sentence in the first place
Y’all. This week’s Vintage Recipe Roulette has to be seen to be believed. I’m a recent convert to the magic of the 2-ingredient recipe after writing up mayonnaise rolls for TODAY (they actually work!), and you know me — I want to give these old recipes a fair shot. Sometimes they are delicious, or at least nutritious, or at least they’re fast and filling.
This one? Well, it’s cheap.
Here’s the recipe:
I have never seen anything like this, but digging around a bit did turn up one similar citizen entry on Food.com. I would have thought this was one deranged person’s fever dream creation, but since it’s also on the internet, chances are it was in a newspaper or on the soup can at some point. (Is this recipe an old friend of yours? I’d love for you to comment with where you’ve heard of it!) The fact that it might have been advertised at some point and yet is almost unheard of today probably says something about its relative value on the deliciousness index. Most recipes for eggs and chicken noodle soup suggest a kind of egg drop thing, where you stir egg into hot soup and swirl as it cooks. That sounds passable. This? It sounds punishable by a court of law. I have grave concerns.
First of all, the soup is undiluted, so this is going to be salty as a seaside pretzel convention. Second, the instructions for cooking are very sparse, and scrambling eggs is a delicate business. If you’re plagued by eggs that come out different every time, you might feel heartened to read about how very small changes in temperature can yield wildly different results. The yolk and white set at different temperatures. It depends on how old the eggs are. It depends on how hot your pan is. The big risk here? This recipe is introducing A LOT of liquid to the egg. Usually, you would add about a teaspoon of milk or water per egg, but this recipe uses more soup than egg — about 2 oz of liquid per egg, a roughly 50-50 ratio. Even if you cook your eggs really carefully, you’re risking watery curds. Maybe with incredible care, following Kenji Lopez-Alt’s cooking lab instructions, you could get something soft and not watery…
But this isn’t that kind of recipe. This is a just make it through the night, cook it until it’s done recipe. I’m just going to grip it and rip it like my childhood golfing idol.
Here are the ingredients (you also need a slice of toast, and butter for the pan):
I’m just making one serving, with 1 egg and 1/4 of the can. Here it is all mixed up (cries):
A lot of chefs counsel against pre-salting eggs, but the best ones say it’s a good idea. It’s a good thing, because this recipe certainly pre-salts the egg with over 500 mg of sodium per shell. It is very…soupy. I am not encouraged.
But I am committed.
I tried to cook it carefully, and while it did stay nice and fluffy, some liquid separated out. I’m not sure that can be avoided unless you’re into raw eggs.
If possible, it looks even worse on toast, even with a modest garnish of scallions. Somehow it just highlights the sheen on the pasta cooked within an inch of its absurd life. I try, I really do try to give these recipes a fair shot, y’all. I took three bites. Without the toast, I’m not sure I could have made it beyond the first one. I can’t overstate the importance of the texture from the toast. Why? Because the squishy noodles in the soft eggs are beyond revolting. It’s a matter of contrasts. When the squishy noodles are compared to plain old liquid broth, they have some form to them, relatively speaking. Those extra-soft noodles added to the scrambled eggs…I don’t know, it’s like the culinary equivalent of brushing your hair by rubbing a clown wig on your head. It just isn’t going to get you very far, and plus, you look like an idiot.
In addition, the flavor combination is really strange. Which ingredient does the most to denigrate the other is a real chicken-and-egg conundrum. It’s way too salty, and you really can’t taste any egg through the canned broth, but the egg texture is front-and-center. The overall effect is pretty disturbing.
Do not make this, I beg you. It’s 100% disgusting. It is irredeemable, irrational, irreligious, irreparable, irreconcilable, and my impulse to have scrambled eggs on toast has been irreparably damaged for the foreseeable future.
ETA: I thought about this all night and finally figured out what this reminded me of — it’s like a hot version of my first entry into Susie Hamilton’s Aspic Invitational. I made Chicken Noodle Soup Salad, an absolutely unforgivable gelatin, mayo, and soup Cthulhu. You can see the recipe if you swipe through on my Instagram about it.
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