Soft-Boiled Eggs

I am really not an egg person. They are somewhat tolerable scrambled, only if they are NOT scrambled in bacon fat residue (which by the way, bacon is another thing I have to remember to put on my hate list). I also once had an excellent Croque Madame sandwich that I haven’t gotten over. It was 6 years ago in Paris when I bit into that grilled ham and cheese sandwich topped with a fried egg and I remember it as if it were yesterday. Sometimes when I think about my Croque Madame sandwich experience a little tear slowly trickles down my face in honor of its memory. Omelets are also awful. Even egg white omelets are awful. They are too heavy and give me an instant migraine. No…I’m serious, I have never had an omelet that didn’t give me a headache.

So this really begs the question: why the enmity for eggs? Have I had a bad experience with eggs – sort of a Pavlovian bell-food-salvia experience? There was an incident with mandarin oranges, a text book example of respondent conditioning, which has permanently affected my ability to eat, taste, look at or buy mandarin oranges, but I can’t recall a similar egg incident.

So I put on my Nancy Drew hat and called this new found project The Quest for the Egg Enmity. I started this project by thinking about the physical characteristics of the egg; oval shaped, outer shell, messy interior that has the potential to grow into a chicken if not victimized by someone’s sunny-side-up craving. The messy interior/potential for growth is what I found most intriguing during my studies on the egg’s physical attributes. I’ll come back to this point in just a bit.

So the next stop on my quest was the internet. I wanted to look-up as many egg cooking techniques as possible hoping that one would leap off the monitor as the culprit to some past egg experience that has generated my egg aversions. There are so many egg cooking techniques. There are the infinite ways to fry an egg, there are hard-boiled eggs, soft-boiled eggs, poached eggs, scrambled eggs and deviled eggs (so appropriately named if you ask me), to name a few. Sorry, but I want to pay a little more attention to the deviled egg before announcing my egg enmity discovery. What’s up with the deviled egg? Why are they even still around and being served? Seriously, deviled eggs must be a cause for many of our society’s and country’s problems. I heard that a senior member (and by senior I mean the most senior) of the White House staff has a daily deviled egg. Case in point?

Okay, so during this nauseating review on how to cook an egg, I put the mental “red flag” next to the soft-boiled egg. Soft-boiled eggs are typically cooked by placing the egg in cold water, which is then brought quickly to a boil and set to simmer for 4-6 minutes. After 4 minutes, the egg white should be set while the egg yolk is still runny. A soft-boiled egg is eaten by cracking the shell and eating the set egg white and running yolk. Remember that scene from Jaws where Hopper and Chief Brody cut open the tiger shark and that milky substance spills out all over the dock? That’s a soft-boiled egg.

Despite this graphic description, there is something much more symbolic about the soft-boiled egg than just its hideous physical qualities. My aversions to eggs, I am discovering, are psychologically rooted. I think (emphasis strongly added) that I am not partial to eggs because for some reason I remind or associate myself with the egg. I have a tough outer shell, and for purposes of this analogy my skin is much like the firmly set egg white of a soft-boiled egg, but if you crack my shell, I can ooze out like an egg yolk. I am a soft-boiled egg. I have that egg shell appearance – confident, proud, resilient, but inside I am a completely different person. I have the potential for being great (much like the egg turning into a chicken), but right now I am still a little reactionary, ultra-sensitive and slightly undefined.

I am not at all worried by this discovery. This is what I do. I seek out projects, much like this supper club, as a way of helping me understand who I am and what I love to do (all things food related). Perhaps this little introspective journey into my egg enmity is a bit of a psychological stretch (seriously, I know it is), but I feel pretty good about it. I think I’ll have a soft-boiled egg tomorrow for breakfast.

Until next time…