Oddly enough, it is to eggs that I turn when I want to remind myself of the comfort of the familiar even though there is something essentially unknowable about them. I enjoy this dynamic tension, the hunger for an egg coupled with disgust over what an egg is if I think too hard about it.
Ten days ago, I bought some duck eggs from the local market. Do you want the unsanitised ones, the stallholder asked me. Yes, that’s fine, I said, not really listening nor understanding what he meant by unsanitised. I forgot about them for a few days, then decided to fry one in a little olive oil until frilly and serve it with the large flakes of Maldon salt that are left behind when you sift it through your fingers back into the salt pig. (God, I sound insufferable.)
The egg looked beautiful. Its shell was blue-white like the sclera of a newborn baby. But it stank when I cracked it into the pan. The white was both clotted and separated, resembling something you’d find in the stomach of a freshly-killed snake after it gains access to the henhouse. (I speak from personal experience here.) It was a shock, like finding out your dear, familiar uncle is a paedophile.
And then I remembered ‘King Rat’ by James Clavell and its egg-cooking scene, which had stuck in my mind in a rather complicated way because I conflated ‘rat’ with ‘egg’ which then reminded me of Templeton, the rat in ‘Charlotte’s Web’ and his rotten egg.
“The King too was concentrating. Over the frypan. He prided himself that no one could cook an egg better than he. To him, a fried egg had to be cooked with an artists eye, and quickly. Yet not too fast.”
These are the “best goddam eggs you’ve ever seen in your life,” the offended King explodes when Peter Marlowe, pays him a compliment in that typically understated British style where “not bad” can actually mean really rather good indeed. These eggs, delicately powdered with pepper, and then salt, were a benediction and Marlowe is certainly aware of that as the King (actually an American corporal) cooked a meal for the famished and barely alive prisoner. So intoxicating was the aroma that some of the other prisoners walk out, barely able to stand it. Clavell’s stripped-back description makes the reader appreciate the exquisite simplicity of such a meal, regardless of its grim context. King Rat was Clavell’s first novel and is based upon this British-born authors own three-year experience as a prisoner in the notorious Changi Prison camp with Marlowe representing his younger self. Set during the Second World War, King Rat describes the struggle for survival of American, Australian, British, Dutch and New Zealander prisoners of war in a Japanese camp in Singapore. The eponymous rats are bred for food by the desperate prisoners, which makes this egg-frying scene all the more distressing as it stimulates our own, indulged, taste buds and reminds us that hunger, distressing starving hunger, makes the best sauce.
A slightly more bucolic fried egg can be found in Elizabeth Romer’s The Tuscan Year, a book about the food grown and eaten by Orlando and Silvana Cerotti. Their fattoria lies at a bend in the road at the head of a valley where the ‘mountains rise steeply’, near Cortona's medieval town and the fields ‘spread like skirts around it’.
“Orlando’s favourite way with eggs, Uovo en Tegame, is again very simple, and often he will prepare them for himself for his Sunday breakfast after mass. He has a tiny frying pan in which he heats up a large quantity of their best olive oil. When it is very hot, he breaks in a fresh egg which immediately puffs up in a white ruff. He lets it cook for a few minutes., spooning the oil over the centre of the egg, but before the yolk is set, he slides the egg out of the pan and eats it with salt and a piece of Tuscan bread. Again it is the quality of the oil and the freshness of the egg that makes this very simple little dish so special.”
And a lovely post about the different colours of eggshells.
Image credit: "Eggs of many colors" by woodleywonderworks is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
I loved King Rat, such a well crafted book, I came to our after I read Shogun and then wanted to read more of his work.
There's little as vom-inducing as a rotten egg and yet eggs remain one of my favourite foods in the world. So versatile, I like them pretty much every which way, not especially fried in butter with a crisp lacy frill and base.