Eggs!

Quails, pullets, hens, ducks, goose, ostrich. Speckled ones, white, cream,brown, blue/green ones. So many to choose from, but my guess is that we mostly choose hens eggs and in this country they are mostly brown these days. The amazing thing is that with all that variety, their structure remains the same – shell, membrane, thin white, thick white, balancers, yolk and germinal disc. They are the most versatile of all our ingredients, whether soft boiled, hard boiled, scrambled, coddled, baked, fried or poached (which is my favourite)not to mention the magnificence of meringues. I remember a wonderful lunch in Lavenham where we were all intrigued by the offer of a crispy egg. Lunch took a while to arrive and the explanation was that so many of us had chosen the dish it gave the chef problems. It was served with kedgeree and we discovered the egg(s) had been lightly poached, then coated in egg and breadcrumbs and quickly deep-fried. Amazing and yes, tricky. Watching Gordon Ramsey wielding a hand mixer and making a cake earlier this week, he looked uncomfortable until he took hold of the first egg and cracked it on the side of the bowl, mixer still whirring, then the second egg and the third. Very cavalier, in my book. What about checking for shell fragments? This week I made another ginger cake and dutifully checked for shell, then in the tiny bowl I’d chosen, gave it a casually quick mix before adding it to the mixing bowl. When I poured the batter into the tin there was a blob of unmixed white and yes, yolk too. I found a clump of baked yolk in the cooked cake and haven’t served it. Yellow amongst the brown doesn’t look good! The moral of the story? Cavalier isn’t clever.