Boiled Egg

We've got some fabulous cookbooks at home. They are works of art in themselves with terrific seductive pictures. But the recipes! Have you noticed how even a simple recipe for, say, Cajun Greens, seems to involve 127 ingredients, 93 of which are things that have never been near your kitchen so long as you have owned it. Does anyone ever go out and buy any of these things that you might use once in 48 recipes - and only when you are really doing a recipe from one of these books, which doesn't include the normal quotidian business of eating?

So if you use one of these recipes, you have to fudge it a bit, which serves two purposes. 1) It means it's not really your fault if the dish doesn't come out like it looks in the book, and doesn't taste great either. 2) It preserves the mystique of the transcendent brilliance of the cooks who write these books, which will encourage you to pay huge sums in their restaurants, and buy more of their books.

When you don't do a lot of cooking, or haven't so far, but want to impress someone with your air of casual, nonchalant competence, (say a prospective girl-friend before whom you are trying to display yourself as sensitive yet skilled) the ability to whip something up without needing a preparatory shopping trip to Perigeux and Fortnum and Mason counts for a lot.

So I've thought how nice it would be to have a cookbook that had a rule that no recipe would have more than 3 ingredients. And they should be the sorts of things that you are likely to have, like eggs, bacon, water, rice. Then, instead of lots of mystical swooning about the unique mood engendered by the Tuscan Sun, it would tell you what to do, in two ways. 1) the simple essence of the matter, and 2) tips and warnings - how to get it to work and all the things that might go wrong.

So here is the first attempt at a useful recipe with tips for the inexperienced.

BOILED EGG

Ingredients: Egg.

The essence: boil an egg in water for 4½ minutes.
Tips and snags:

Have the water boiling before you put the egg in. Best to use a small saucepan or you’ll be waiting all day for the water to boil. But the water must be deep enough to cover the egg completely. No “mostly submerged” like rocks off the coast of San Francisco, or hump-back whales casually passing by. The water must be deep enough, but don’t put the egg in until the water is really boiling. Don't let the water be too deep, else it will spill over when you put the egg into it. Remember Archimedes and "Eureka!"? Then lower the egg in very carefully, using a spoon big enough to hold it steady. If the egg drops into the water even a little bit, it will probably break and quickly look disgusting, like a tiny mammal with a hideous hernia, all of its guts hanging out. Yuck. It’s a bad enough shock being lowered into boiling water; don’t give the poor thing a bump as well.

Have a clock within eyesight. You don’t need an egg timer or a kitchen timer or a stopwatch or anything like that. Just notice what time it is, for heaven’s sake. A clock on the wall is handy, or your watch will do. But a watch is not as good as a clock, because you'll inevitably be using your arm for some other purpose when the time comes, so that you are not able to twist your wrist to see what the time is. A clock on the wall needs to have a second hand that sweeps round, so that you can be accurate to within about 5 seconds or so. It matters.

So, just before you lower the egg into the water, take note of what time it is. Do the math now. Figure out what now plus four and a half minutes is. It might be harder than you think. Then just remember the end time. You'll forget the immersion time anyway. So put the egg into the water, and pay attention or you’ll leave it too long. You can turn down the heat a bit now. You needed it high to get the water to boil before midnight, but the actual boiling process doesn't have to look like Yellowstone, which can happen if an egg did crack a bit. Keep it just at boiling. When exactly four and a half minutes have passed, take the egg out of the water with your spoon. End of cooking.

Incidentally, if you want to boil several eggs at the same time, you don’t need any more time, just more water. All the eggs have to be submerged, the water must be boiling, and it still takes just four and a half minutes. Of course, a problem can arise if you take too long getting all the eggs in. If you rush so that they all cook for the same time, you’ll probably break some. If you are slow and careful, the first ones will cook for longer than the later ones. Yipes! But don’t worry about that. A few seconds here or there isn’t going to be a disaster, but with a lot of eggs don’t go past the four and a half minutes after the last egg goes in, ‘cos the first eggs will have already been in for longer. If you want hard-boiled eggs, make it 6 minutes.

When the eggs are done, don’t forget to turn off the heat under the water, to avoid you or someone else getting scalded. Keep the handle turned to the back to avoid unguided transient elbows. You can’t use the water for anything else either, as it’s all egg-shelly. It may still look like clean water in a saucepan, but it is best to wash the pan well, as there’s loads of eggy minerals in the water now.

How you serve the egg is up to you, but egg cups are a great idea, making the egg sit up proudly to be eaten. I do not recommend the odd habit in America of leaving the egg rolling around on a plate like an overheated rigid football that you have to chase in some way of your own devising. The most sophisticated gourmet is going to look silly chasing an egg with burned fingers. So you need something to hold it still, and stop the innards rolling back onto the bits of shell after you have cracked it open. It's almost as disgusting as two other bizarre American habits. Giving you a cup of tea with nowhere polite to put the teabag, and giving you only one knife and fork, so that you have to smear the table cloth with thousand island dressing and gravy and hollandaise sauce in order to have anything to eat the pork with. Goodness! This is a rich country. There are thousands of plates, lots of glasses, huge portions of food, but even with dishwashers a huge restaurant chain cannot scrape together two forks!? How much less trouble to wash a fork than launder a whole table-cloth. Jeez!

Anyway, a wild unconstrained egg is a bad idea because it is too hot to get hold of. You'll burn your fingers trying, or settle for eating a cold boiled egg. (Loose both sensitivity and competence points for that.) Egg cups are great, or nestle it nicely in a small tea-cup or espresso cup (you do have those don't you? After all, I'm sure you can make a cup of coffee, and espresso cups ensure effortless superiority,) using a paper towel or even a linen napkin. (Extra sensitivity points for the linen.)

Some people like a little salt sprinkled on their egg once the shell is opened. I don’t. It’s fun to dip fingers of toast into the egg to soak up the yolk, but the most important thing is a really small spoon, so that you can scrape the insides out without breaking the shell more than you need to get in there. Yum.

That's it!

Bonus: A bit of science fun for the kiddies.

When the egg comes out of the boiling water it is very hot, obviously. You can handle it with a spoon or with tongs. If you immediately hold it under cold running water, in just a few seconds it will feel fairly cool. Right at that moment ask a child to hold it and tell them it is the magic self-cooking egg that loves to be hot. They will hold the fairly cold egg, and in just a matter of seconds it will be too hot to hold again, as heat moves from the inside to the shell, which is all you really managed to cool down by using water. Awe and astonishment all round.


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