Breaking Eggs

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

 

This is the first riddle many kids in many parts of the world ever solve, and a source of great fun and wonder. The egg, with its perfect form and potential for life, is magical. Innumerable riddles and rhymes, puns and proverbs have been written about it. In some literary traditions, the egg represents the origin of life, the world egg that broke and divided into two parts – heaven and earth. 

Finnish folk tales describe the yolk as the sun, the white as the moon, and the broken fragments of the shell as stars.  In Chinese tradition,  the egg is heaven, the yolk is earth.

In this lyrical English riddle, the egg is majestic, regal, an egg Fabergé might have created.

In a marble hall white as milk,
Lined with skin as soft as silk,
Within a fountain crystal-clear
A golden apple doth appear.
No doors there are to this stronghold,
Yet thieves break in to steal its gold.

The classic conundrum asks which came first, the chicken or the egg. That leads to the question of whether to have the immediate satisfaction of eating the egg, or the deferred pleasure of letting it hatch into a chicken or duck or other fowl and eating it later, as this eighteenth-century riddle suggests. To keep a nest egg, as it were.

As I was walking in a field of wheat,
I picked up something good to eat;
Neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor bone,
I kept it till it ran alone.

But eggs are more than metaphors or fables. In practical terms, they’re a terrific source of nutrition and one of the most versatile foods in the kitchen. From soft-boiled eggs to eggs Benedict, from deviled eggs to egg nogs, there are many, many ways to serve eggs. The Irish poet Thomas Moore defended the French, with only a bit of exaggeration, by asking, “Who can help loving the land that has taught us six hundred and eighty-five ways to dress eggs?”

Omelets are among the best ways to dress eggs. Made since at least the early seventeenth century, probably long before, they’re endlessly adaptable. Escoffier has nearly 80 omelet recipes.  The 1965 edition of the Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cookbook has more than 60, including a couple of variations on egg foo yung. In The Hundred Glories of French Cooking, author Robert Courtine has a recipe for something he calls variously “Omelette Surprise Brésilienne,” “Omelette Norvégienne,” and “Omelet filled with ice cream.” However, the recipe is actually for baked Alaska, not an omelet.

Much foolishness has been written about making omelets – they’re the ultimate test of a cook’s skill, one must have a special omelet pan and and use it for nothing else, omelets’ bottoms must be as smooth as a baby’s – but actually they’re quick, easy, and if the bottom is a bit bumpy, who cares?  It’s on the bottom. No one sees it.

One thing is true, though. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

This recipe is from eighteenth-century author Elizabeth Raffald. Vary it as you like.

TO MAKE AN OMELETTE

Put a quarter of a pound of butter into a frying pan. Break six eggs and beat them a little, strain them through a hair sieve. Put them in when your butter is hot and strew in a little shred parsley and boiled ham scraped fine with nutmeg, pepper and salt. Fry it brown on the under side. Lay it on your dish but don’t turn it, hold a hot salamander  [a metal implement that is heated and held over foodstuffs to brown them] half a minute over it to take off the raw look of the eggs. Stick curled parsley in it and serve it up. N. B. You may put in clary [ a plant in the mint family] and chives or onions if you like. – The Experienced English Housekeeper, Elizabeth Raffald, 1769.

Comments

[chienseeggrecipes]

very interesting story,i love it.thanks for sharing again.