Wow...eggs in spaghetti sauce...no 'im-pastas' here. 
My journey to find the origins of a family recipe.
By Felicia LaLomia - Delish - 4 No 22
"For as long as I can remember, my family has been putting hard-boiled eggs in our red sauce. Normally on Sundays or holidays, we gather around the table and fill our bowls with pasta and sauce that's been bubbling away in a pot for hours. While some families fight over the meatballs, we fight over the eggs.
The eggs are a little overcooked. They are transported from hot water to ice water, stripped of their shells, and then simmered in sauce. The slightly chalky yolk crumbles into the sauce, and the cooked white is stained red for a few millimeters. They are a creamy, protein-filled addition to the meal. It adds a surprising richness.
Despite its popularity in my family, I’d never heard of anyone else adding hard-boiled eggs to their pasta sauce. Not people of Italian heritage, or more specifically Sicilian heritage, which my family is—no one. I googled "hard-boiled eggs in tomato sauce" and found some recipes for cracked eggs simmered in sauce and hard-boiled eggs cooked in a vegetable-based sauce. But nothing like what my family does.
I was once told—or so I think I was—that this was a leftover habit from the Great Depression. When meat was too expensive, hard-boiled eggs were used in place of meatballs. I figured the tradition had evolved, and we now just add it to any tomato sauce, regardless if there's meat in it.
My great-grandfather immigrated from rural Sicily to the Buffalo, NY, area in the mid-1910s. With this in mind, I searched for evidence of other Italian Americans doing this. I looked to experts in the field of Italian immigration and culinary traditions. I reached out to food historians, Great Depression historians, and scoured the What America Eats database on culinary traditions from that era.
[...]...We do it all the time,” said Peter LoJacono, president of the Federation of Italian American Societies of Western New York. “Our family loves hard-boiled eggs in the sauce.”
When I asked him about its origins, he said, “It did probably flourish during the Depression, and that gave us a whole new kind of meaning, but I don't think that was where it started. I think it was something that came from [Sicily] and was brought here.”
He told me to google “uova sode in salsa di pomodoro,” Italian for hard-boiled eggs in tomato sauce. I found many recipes for the dish, all in Italian. So it does exist, just not on English websites.
Read More: Hard boiled eggs in red sauce
"Life is a combination of magic and pasta". Federico Fellini
My journey to find the origins of a family recipe.
By Felicia LaLomia - Delish - 4 No 22
"For as long as I can remember, my family has been putting hard-boiled eggs in our red sauce. Normally on Sundays or holidays, we gather around the table and fill our bowls with pasta and sauce that's been bubbling away in a pot for hours. While some families fight over the meatballs, we fight over the eggs.
The eggs are a little overcooked. They are transported from hot water to ice water, stripped of their shells, and then simmered in sauce. The slightly chalky yolk crumbles into the sauce, and the cooked white is stained red for a few millimeters. They are a creamy, protein-filled addition to the meal. It adds a surprising richness.
Despite its popularity in my family, I’d never heard of anyone else adding hard-boiled eggs to their pasta sauce. Not people of Italian heritage, or more specifically Sicilian heritage, which my family is—no one. I googled "hard-boiled eggs in tomato sauce" and found some recipes for cracked eggs simmered in sauce and hard-boiled eggs cooked in a vegetable-based sauce. But nothing like what my family does.
I was once told—or so I think I was—that this was a leftover habit from the Great Depression. When meat was too expensive, hard-boiled eggs were used in place of meatballs. I figured the tradition had evolved, and we now just add it to any tomato sauce, regardless if there's meat in it.
My great-grandfather immigrated from rural Sicily to the Buffalo, NY, area in the mid-1910s. With this in mind, I searched for evidence of other Italian Americans doing this. I looked to experts in the field of Italian immigration and culinary traditions. I reached out to food historians, Great Depression historians, and scoured the What America Eats database on culinary traditions from that era.
[...]...We do it all the time,” said Peter LoJacono, president of the Federation of Italian American Societies of Western New York. “Our family loves hard-boiled eggs in the sauce.”
When I asked him about its origins, he said, “It did probably flourish during the Depression, and that gave us a whole new kind of meaning, but I don't think that was where it started. I think it was something that came from [Sicily] and was brought here.”
He told me to google “uova sode in salsa di pomodoro,” Italian for hard-boiled eggs in tomato sauce. I found many recipes for the dish, all in Italian. So it does exist, just not on English websites.
Read More: Hard boiled eggs in red sauce
