On eggs

There is no region on earth less desirable than the cold borders of a fried egg.  How those crusted edges can exist so far from their sunny centre God only knows, but humans should never venture there.  I think that is what my mother meant when she informed me: “There’s nothing worse than a cold egg.”

Our relationship with eggs is close: we come from one, we eat them, admire their shape and make gifts of them: from cheap chocolate to priceless Fabergé. But there’s ambivalence too:  a teacher once wrote in my report: “His work is like the curate’s egg”, something which I could not understand, but then neither did my parents.  They, though, were interested to look it up: it didn’t help to find out that it meant good in places, but bad in others.  I thought this was preferable to mediocre, but that did not go down too well with my parents.  Had my work continued to decline I imagine that he would have described it as “addled”, and then “rotten”, upon which, as happens to rotten eggs, I would have been thrown out of the school.

One egg, though, did bring a smile to my youthful dial. I still see the Giles cartoon from the 1950s in which a massive billboard stands alongside a railway station with the words: “Go to work on an egg.”  In the bottom right corner stands a man in shirtsleeves with a long sledgehammer, readying himself to bring it down on a little egg sitting so innocently in its cup.  Strange idea, this, eggs as a source of energy when they are fragile, can’t be trusted and look puny.

Standing with a sledgehammer over a boiled egg would have suited many.  Though the outer regions of a fried one is my no-go area, the prospect of a boiled one is torture for others.  There’s no reward here: shards of flinty shell protect the rubbery white which, when you eventually get to, swells in the mouth and, on the way down the throat, grows Velcro – the yolk always seems to be on the far end of the white.  If taste and texture don’t do you to death, choking will.  

But at least boiled eggs have an egg’s best feature, its shape, to bank on. Scrambled do not: at best they look like something you may eat; at worst like something you have eaten. 

At this stage poacheds may think they’ve won the prize.  Unfortunately for them, the world of fashionable eating has dealt a body blow.  Gone is the neat sun-in-the-window look which came from the neat poaching pan.  Now what is seen on your plate resembles a blancmange gone wrong or what you’d seal a bath with, which explains why Benedict has been summoned to anoint it with large measures of sauce.

Coddled eggs go one better.  They conceal their less than appealing raw  state by being boiled in a decorated china receptacle which resembles a Grecian urn with a tiny lid atop.  Upon opening the lid, the cooked eggy mess appears – like something you might find in a Grecian urn.

Looks and taste aside, there are people who won’t eat eggs.  Some don’t for health reasons, others for ethical.  With regard to the health side, the jury’s never likely to come in, but the ethical view is that eating eggs exploits an animal and limits its life to producing food for human consumption. At present, hens lay eggs which are not fertilised.  This is habitual and the rate is increased by exposure to light.  Were this harvesting of these eggs halted and the birds returned to the wild, such habitual laying would gradually cease and eventually they might only lay eggs after fertilisation by a rooster.  I wonder what would happen if we returned to the wild: we’d steal these fertilised eggs.  But then we’d realise that stealing them meant no more hens around, at which stage we’d keep some captive so that we could keep them alive, harvest their eggs and sell to our neighbours.  We might even start a business, then a factory. If I’m not mistaken, we’ll end up where we now are.

Eggs will always be with us.  After all, we come from one.  The ancients knew this, too.  Phoenicians, Egyptians, Hindus and the Japanese maintained that the world was hatched from an egg and that the world was egg-shaped.  But this all came to nought with the knowledge of the big O.  Since then eggs have had a more proverbial status.  On the whole, they do better there than dogs, which have a bad name and hang.  The worst fate ascribed for eggs is to be sucked by grandmothers.  However, their value is redeemed by not putting them all in one basket nor counting them before they’re hatched.  What’s also going for them is that, as sure as eggs are eggs, they’ll never change.  An egg is an egg is an egg.  It did come first.