On Boiled Eggs; The Breakfasting Arts III
The second part of my opus on the first meal of the day concerns soft boiled eggs
Having previously written about marmalade, and bacon one of the other cornerstones of a true breakfast the soft boiled egg. It’s one of the few breakfasts I’ve ever seen my mother eat with much enjoyment and something I can recall my grandfather cooking in a haphazard, chaotic and eccentric manner. My wife is also something of a fan of this variety of egg, though her continental approach leaves the egg half peeled rather than correctly decapitated in true Tudor fashion.
Choosing the Eggs.
You need the best eggs you can find for this, a good step above your “cooking egg” which adds protein or sticking power to recipes. The best we ever had came from a neighbour in Italy who kept chickens and had an honesty box, those eggs had the almost red yolks that I’ve only ever really come across on a regular basis there. Luckily, many genuine outdoor eggs are pretty good now though we’ve found those sold as “double yolkers” to be something of a gimmick and you need to avoid any brand that has any hint of fishy flavour where the dumb* little chickens have been fed on ground up fish meal.
Anecdotally, we find white shelled eggs to be less prone to cracking in the water. Not sure why this may be so, but it seems to hold true for us. The usual colour of English eggs is brown, so maybe it’s simply a few suppliers giving a diet with more calcium.
Timing
I’ve read of the “3 minute” egg, and can even remember television adverts to that effect from my childhood. James Bond also had one of his many obsessions over soft boiled eggs, requiring a “single egg, in the dark blue egg cup with a gold ring around the top, was boiled for three and a third minutes. It was a very fresh, speckled brown egg from French Marans hens owned by some friend of May in the country.”
Any egg I cooked for so short a time would have to be quail sized or would otherwise emerge from its shell as a semi-congealed snotty mess. Not recommended. It’s not as if we live at altitude, or the boiling point of water has changed since the 60s so I can only think that the size of the eggs has gone up. If you buy egg cups from an antique shop, they don’t seem to be markedly smaller though.
Through much trial and error I have settled on five and a half minutes as being the optimum time for large eggs. This leaves the white fully cooked, and the yolk still runny. Going further starts moving towards hard-boiled territory, whilst aiming much shorter is an abomination of stringy and semi-congealed protein. I can recall my grandfather simply boiling a few at a time and randomly guessing when they’d be ready. Not sure why he did that, but he also ate breakfast outside almost year-round.
Accoutrements
There’s an impressive array of gadgetry which you can obtain for beheading your boiled eggs. Some of it looks straight out of the Summer 1507 Spanish Inquisition catalogue, and none of it is necessary.
Aside from a pan of boiling water, you need a spoon, an egg cup, a timer and buttered brown toast correctly cut into thin “soldiers”
I could digress into egg timers, little egg shaped bits of no-doubt toxic plastic which go in the boiling water or any other gadget to measure doneness. Let’s face it though, you’ll use your kitchen timer or phone. On the matter of spoons I’m prepared to be tolerant and allow both round tipped and pointier teaspoons. The sulphur in eggs causes silver to tarnish faster, so if you’re using silver spoons then you’ll need to polish them more frequently.
It’s the matter of egg cups where you can really let your inner eccentric shine. Many people I’ve met over the years have a treasured childhood egg cup which still comes out of the cupboard most weekend breakfasts. On the other hand, I have a very Italian modernist style coiled spring eggcup which I’ve found to be neat and accommodating of a variety of sized eggs.
As for egg cosies, they are something which I put in the same category as toast racks. A nice idea for those who eat at glacial pace or like hot food which has gone cold.
A very enjoyable article. Thank you. I do have to disagree about chicken intelligence though. Yes, they still operate without heads. However, of our many chickens over the years, A few have stood out. One was Spot, A Speckled Sussex. We had an older Miniature Schnauzer named Beau who had become paralyzed in his back end. I would pick him up to take him outside to do his business and just be outside in the warm sun. One day, Spot was getting very noisy and it was not time for feeding. She was going from window to window "aaak, aaak, aaak", and kept getting louder. My wife said that I had better go see what her problem was. She walked me over to poor Beau who had wedged himself between the support of a bench we have and a stack of flower pots and was stuck. I picked him up and she turned away as if to say, "my work is done, you're welcome!"