Eggs in purgatory

This dish exists because someone, somewhere in southern Italy, came home at 3am on a Saturday after too many glasses of red, opened the fridge, and found tomatoes, eggs, and yesterday's bread. Fifteen minutes later he had a weighted blanket in pan form. It is called uova in purgatorio because the eggs sit in a bubbling red tomato sauce. Also possibly because of how you feel while making it.

We discovered this dish the morning after our cousin's thirtieth birthday party, which had gone on until approximately the invention of daylight. We were sleeping on the sofa of a flat in Naples that belonged to one of his friends, a man we had never properly met, and we were woken at 10am by the smell of tomato and garlic and something unreasonably good. The friend, it turned out, had a hangover ritual: one can of tomatoes, three eggs, a chili, the end of a loaf of bread, and a small cast-iron pan that he refused to let anyone else wash. He made six portions of eggs in purgatory at once, in shifts, and a small queue formed in the corridor. We ate ours sitting on the floor. He asked us how we felt afterwards, and we said meglio, better. He nodded and said così dovrebbe essere, that's how it should be.

What follows is our home version, scaled down to one sad person. The trick with any eggs-in-sauce dish is to let the sauce thicken properly before the eggs go in, otherwise the whites spread into a pale pink mess. Simmer the sauce, make wells with the back of a spoon, crack the eggs, lid on, low heat. Toast bread while you wait. Eat straight from the pan with the bread for dipping. Do not share this dish. It is medicine, and medicine is not for sharing.