For as long as I can remember, I've had a complicated relationship with eggs.
I know that there are many who endlessly swoon over the various joys of the humble chicken egg-- scrambled, fried, hard-boiled, pouched---but I just couldn't see it. Since childhood, a cooked egg triggered in me a mix of horror and revulsion, mixed with a sad twinge of shame. I knew I was missing out on something. Everyone raved about the delicious savory depth of a bright yellow yolk, the perfection of Eggs Benedict for a Sunday brunch. A souffle puffed up! A freshly made mayonnaise! A glorious deviled egg, sprinkled with that dusting of paprika! Yet when I thought of eggs, I experienced a sensory reaction: first, a feeling a chalky paste on my tongue, then-- a shiver of a memory of something that was at once tasteless and also so overwhelmingly flavored as to be nauseating.
My memory of eggs from childhood is this: crying as I try, desperately, to avoid having to eat the yolk of a hard-boiled egg. My mother has made us hard-boiled eggs and I want to just eat the flavorless, jello-like outer white part. She tells me I have to eat the yolk too, as the nutrients are there. I am crying and crying, trying to avoid that little greenish yellow ball of misery haunting me from the inside of palatable white. I didn't love the white of the egg, but I could handle it over the horrid yellow inside, dry and sticking to the roof of my mouth like paste. In my food memory, hard-boiled eggs= tears. Pasty, miserable, terrible to swallow.
So, I was not a fan.
Sure- I could eat an omelette. If stuffed with enough strong cheese, vegetables, mushrooms-- okay. Topped with hot sauce or ketchup-- fine. Egg As Flavor Delivery Device I could handle. Anything to mask the flavor of this strange animal-created food that tasted not of animal but of.... something else. Something undefinable.
Why did everyone love them so much when I couldn't stand the sight of them? Worst of all, for me, was the "runny yolk" so popular on restaurant tables and cooking shows. Nothing made me more horrified then to see that yellow slightly viscous goop sliding around on someone's toast. Or bowl of noodles. Why would you do that to a perfectly good bowl of other ingredients? Poison it with a runny, snotty blob? And why did everyone else lick their lips and praise the joys of the bright yellow yolk swimming around on their plates? My inability to stomach the thought of eating this odd liquidy thing that is both slippery and, somehow, able to hold it's shape made me feel immature. Inexperienced. A philistine in the world of food pleasures.
In one of my early years of teaching in Philadelphia, our school offered us free flu shots in the winter. I went to get my shot, and experienced the one and only allergic reaction of my life. My arm was red and swallow, the area around the shot burning hot. The hives traveled to my chest, my face, and my stomach. Puzzled, I went back to the doctor who had given us the shots. She asked, "Ah? Are you allergic to eggs?" Apparently they use some material from raw egg yolks to hold the material needed for the flu shot. Ah-ha! Allergic to eggs! Perhaps that explains my lifelong revulsion? My terror of the yellow blob?
Having no hard evidence to either prove or disprove this theory, I continued my own personal experimentation-- desperate to join the ranks of the Glory is the Runny Yolk crowd. I'm not sure why I wanted do badly to be able to enjoy the goopy mess-- but perhaps it seemed to me that there was some sort of sophistication associated with the sunny side egg, and I felt too much of a child to be able to enjoy such pleasures. I wanted to be a grown up too!
Luckily for me, I met and started to date Michael. He loved eggs of all kinds and taught me an important secret: salt. If you salt your scrambled eggs, if you liberally salt and pepper a hard-boiled egg, the taste is elevated far beyond ordinary egg-ness. Also, a hard-boiled egg must be perfectly timed to be just yellow enough-- but not green and pasty-- to be enjoyed. Still- though- my love of Michael's eggs was limited only to his homemade hard boiled and omelettes. My terror of the unleashed yolk continued, unabated.
And then. There was the Burbank airport.
I know. I know. For any of you who live in Los Angeles (Wendy Lopata!), you can't begin to imagine why on earth a blog about food would include a sentence implying something culinary happened at the Burbank airport (and mind you- it's official name is the Bob Hope Airport so you can kind of imagine the place even if you've never been there). But the Burbank airport will always hold a special place in my heart-- and not just because it is the airport we fly to to visit my sister and her family. It's the place where I first ate a runny yolk, and lived to tell the tale.
I meant to order a hard-boiled egg. What arrived, instead, was a soft-boiled egg. I looked at my plate-- horrified, almost close to tears. Michael said, "Just try it! Put some salt and pepper on it and dip your toast in there." I'm embarrassed to admit- I was so upset, I was shaking. There might have been tears. There I was -- 37 years old, a self-proclaimed Food Obsessive, a devourer of food writing, food adventurer around the world; someone who eagerly ate seafood of all types with the heads on, tore into cheeks of giant fish, ate hearts of ducks and chickens, ate crickets and snails and eel, loved all kind of fish eggs with abandon, ate any kind of vegetable, no matter how bitter, ate durian (hated it) and jackfruit (loved it) and felt the taste of a fabulous, strong, smelly French cheese was as close to orgasmic as one can get without, actually, having an orgasm--- and I was crying about a soft-boiled egg. In the Burbank airport.
So I tried it.
It's a moment I will never forget. For there-- in the silly little diner, in the Burbank airport-- I tasted actual EGG for the first time in my life. I believe, once I finished my bite, I said to Michael, "Oh... my.... GOD." It was incredible. I had no idea that that the tasteless, air filled stuff I had been filling with cheese or covering in hot sauce all these years tasted like THAT. Rich, dense, beautifully-- deep. A flavor that was undefinable and yet so unique. The best word I have to describe it is FULL. Mouth-filling. Body-filling. Soul-filling. Bright and thick and so... if you'll excuse the odd description... alive. I had never tasted anything like it.
Michael said-- "If you like that, wait until you try a fried egg!" And so at our next destination that summer, in Philadelphia, I ordered fried eggs at the Marathon Grill. They arrived-- bright yellow yolks, sunny side to the sky-- and I couldn't believe the joy I was having with every bite. I'd never tasted anything that felt so complete to me, so perfectly packed with nutrients and flavor and-- what? Thickness? Iron? Vitamins? I don't know-- but it was as if each bite filled my whole being with some kind of buttery goodness. A fuel my body had been missing for 37 years.
And now, of course, I can't stop eating the damn things. And I can report that the best fried eggs I've had so far have been in Amsterdam. That is a city that is downright obsessed with fried eggs. Every bar, every cafe, has them on the menu- just fried simply, with local brown bread. I can tell you from experience that there may be nothing more perfect on earth than sitting by a canal on a sunny day in June, dunking your brown Dutch sourdough bread into a beautiful bright yellow European egg.
Although I might also add that hard-boiled quail eggs, served with lime salt and chili powder, as a snack before a seafood meal in Denang, Vietnam is also pretty amazing.
Quail eggs are also tasty in fried form-- but sweeter, and less rich in the middle, I think. They are also delicious skewered and roasted on an open grill as part of "yakatori" in Japan:
Another lovely treat is a fried egg on top of a crab-rice dish, made in Galle, Sri Lanka-- pictured here.
It was a long journey that took only 37 years to reach a satisfactory conclusion. Dear eggs of the world-- I plan to consume as much of you as I can. I'm sorry I maligned you for so long. And, clearly, I'm not allergic to you.
Up next to try? Poached eggs. They look very impressive in their funny Round but Wavy On the Surface shape, but haven't had the chance yet to try one. It's on my food-obsessive life list, I promise.
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