Tomato and Egg

There was this dish that we, the foreign teachers, regularly ate in China: tomato and egg. It sounds a little gross, doesn’t it? Tomatoes and eggs. You think of tomatoes and you think pasta, pizza, sandwiches, salads. Eggs are for breakfast, in omelets. served with toast, or as an ingredient in cake. They’re two completely different foods.

I don’t remember when we first had it, or what possessed anyone to order it, but I’m sure I was a little repulsed when the piping hot plate was first brought out to our table. Chunks of scrambled eggs mixed in with pieces of soft tomato. It reeked of texture violations.

But, in that little city we lived in, there weren’t any alternatives. No matter what dishes we ordered it would be weird, somehow. Potatoes sliced as thin as a finger nail, cooked with vinegar and peppers, mushrooms coated in a thick goo of a sauce.

So I took up my chopsticks in my weak, fork-accustomed hand, and suspiciously plucked a piece of scrambled egg that was finely coated in a thin sauce. I chewed, and it was good. Mysteriously the garlic, the other spices, maybe a splash of soy sauce and sesame oil, made it good. Mysterious I say because I could never figure out how these two mutually exclusive foods could morph into a dish, so simple, so tasty, that is became a regular part of our diet. Not because I made it, though I tried. Towards the end, we at out at least weekly at the Muslim restaurant around the corner from our apartment.

Take-out tomato & egg from the neighborhood Muslim restaurant (yes that's a fork-- I maintain it's impossible to eat noodles with chopsticks).

Many a kuai was spent on eggs and different varieties of tomatoes as I tried to work out how the Chinese did it. Did they cook the eggs and tomatoes separately and mix them together right before serving? Cook egg first and then tomatoes or the other way around? What spices exactly? How much oil?

It didn’t help that whenever we asked, and we asked several different people, we got different answers. One person told us to use a packet of spices meant for dumplings, another told us to cook noodles in the wok along with the eggs and tomatoes. Different cities we visited prepared them slightly different as well—some added green onions. Some sauces were thicker. Usually it was served with rice, but the Muslim restaurant served it with noodles.

After two years, and trying and failing at everyone’s advice, I managed to produce a reasonable facsimile of the tomato-egg dish, though it was nowhere near as flavorful as what our usual restaurants prepared, and the tomatoes were always too mushy (a consequence of my perennial fear of under-cooking). But even that is too generous. Whatever I made didn’t measure up, though it improved overall through sheer stubbornness and through the help of a friend, who gave me a cooking lesson.

That seems like a lifetime ago and that dish, our old stand-bye when we were traveling, that dish that was part of our regular diet, that dish that I really liked, I have no desire to ever eat that again.

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