Some things just stay with you, however you change, or age. That's how it is with eggs and me. I grew up eating and savoring eggs of all kinds, prepared in all manner of ways: hardboiled, poached, fried hard, fried with drippy yellow yolks, served with bacon, with ham, with potatoes and of course sausage of all kinds. Even prepared raw in an egg nog, with milk, sugar, and vanilla extract. I loved deviled eggs and could eat them one after the other with abandon. My favorite sandwich was egg-salad with plenty of hard-cooked yolks and salad cream. In England, I learned how similar my tradition of eggy breakfast was with that of the "mother country" and of the delicious breakfast-eggs they served there. My favorite "fry up" was fresh farm eggs with black and white sausage, "doorstep toast" (similar to our "Texas toast") and fried tomatoes and of course baked beans are always served as the accompaniment to eggs. There too they have " real bacon" not the streaky, belly bacon we serve here but more meaty back-bacon of the Yorkshire hogs. In France, I learned about the delicate, sophisticated omelette, with fine herbs, and others with various meats and cheeses. In Spain, I found that the egg could be used as a main meal, as a tapas or "pincho" to accompany wine and beer in a tapas bar or even as a main meal in a torte, with potatoes and cooked with a tomato sauce. I loved them in every form and in every way. I also had the experience of raising hens to lay eggs. As a young man, then living and working on a back-to-nature farm, my wife and I raised Rhode Island Red hens (and some roosters) for their eggs. In those days, we produced enough eggs to give them away each day and had abundant eggs to use in every way and form.
As a child, on Easter mornings we all feasted on hard-boiled eggs and kielbasa, toast and butter. The eggs were started from cold water and boiled until just done, then mom would dump the entire batch into icy cold water to loosen the shells. The yolks were pure yellow when opened and the shells slipped off like a loose winter coat. The whites came away clean and neat. On these occasions, I would watch my grandpa eat his eggs. He always sliced his eggs open with his dinner knife so he had the two halves in front of him on his plate. Then he would slather the top of each with a bit of soft butter and then salt and pepper the top. He then slid the prepared egg out of its shell with the round point of his table knife and ate each one down in one bite. I had never seen anyone else eat eggs in this manner, until years and years later when I was at a quite fancy French resort in Provence where a man at the next table, apparently of central European origin (from his appearance) did exactly the same thing. Later in the day, on Ester Sundays we hunted for more hardboiled eggs in our grden and ate them cold when we found them.
Francis O. my paternal grandpa on a occasional early in the morning visit to our home was invited for breakfast and would easily down six eggs, a stack of toast, plus bacon and sausage too--all at one sitting. My Dad started his day, every day with eggs and bacon, or eggs and ham, eggs and Canadian bacon or eggs and scrapple, or eggs and corned beef, or on Saturday or Sunday steak and eggs-- all of these were accompanied with dark-toasted white bread, slathered with butter and all washed down with jugs of dark coffee modulated to a steamy brown with fresh,creamy milk.
As a child, my first awakening thoughts each morning was of my breakfast---and eggs. Sometimes I would have the enjoyment of being awakened by the aroma of frying bacon. But at other times, it was just the thought of bacon swimming in its sizzling fat and surrounded by cooked eggs that would rouse me. Then I would stumble down to the kitchen to stand next to mom as she cooked breakfast at the big white gas range. I watched her crack the brown eggs and gently drop them into the hot fat in the pan. And I listened to them sizzle and crackle as she lightly salted and peppered each firm, plump, bosomy, upright yolk. She often let the egg whites get a little too brown and crinkly around the edges for my tastes, but I never complained and could forgive her for that. For then she would expertly flip each egg over with a well used, shiny, iron spatula, then turn off the gas flame to continue the frying for thirty seconds more to permit the pan contents to reach a steamy doneness, and only then slide the eggs smoothly off into a oven- heated plate. Her finishing touch, just before I took over with knife and form, was to poke each yolk at the very center to form a tiny hole with the corner of the spatula to let the still-runny yellow seep out temptingly. Then, with my hair still bed-tousled, I would eagerly sit down on the hard kitchen chair in front of the steaming plate of eggs garnished with bacon, (not too crispy!) and a side dish heaped with dark toast, cut in half to form triangles and slathered with slightly salted deep yellow butter. Then slowly, with great care and anticipation, I would start my feast by poking the sharp corner of my toast into one of the tiny weep holes of runny yellow in the yolk to take my first taste of my morning egg.
The best part of camping trips of course was breakfasts of fresh eggs and thick slabs of bacon cooked over the open fire. At the age of ten years old, I cooked my first eggs and bacon on my own camp fire made of dry willow sticks in under a giant drooping willow tree that created a great umbrella over my campsite. The hot, fast fire quickly cooked the bacon to a savory sizzling crispness in the long handled folding-frying pan, I had. (It was a treasured gift from, our kind old neighbor Mrs Franza, whose son had used it first as a Boy Scout and who had tragically died in a swimming accident off of the 69th Street pier in Brooklyn. She gave it to me one day over the back yard fence, saying "Here Robbie, I want you to have this, it was Ernesto's, I think he would like to know it was being used again." ) The bacon strips were just at the perfect crispness and emitting a mouth watering aroma when I took them out of the pan with a willow stick and laid them on the metal plate next to the fire. I cracked each country-fresh egg (filched that very morning from grandpa's hen house) and let each one down carefully into the sizzling bacon grease in the pan. They crackled over the high fire and were just ready to be slid out of the pan when I heard a loud pricing cry that made the hair on the back of my young neck stand up.
"FIRE," screamed my Aunt Olga in a piercing terror-stricken voice. She sounded as if she was at the clothes line only a short distance from where I was cooking my rustic breakfast.
"There's a fire in the willow tree!" yelled my aunt Yolanda, from the back porch of my grandfather's house, only fifty feet away.
"Where?" yelled an anxiously hoarse voice, I immediately recognized as my grandfather's.
"Smoke is billowing out from the top of the willow tree in the garden," yelled one of my older cousins excitedly.
"Call the police!" yelled someone else.
In a nervous panic and fear of discovery, I dropped the sizzling frying pan with its nearly cooked eggs, the contents skidded out onto the dusty soil under the tree as I hastily kicked soil over them. Then stomped out the small campfire, scattering the smoldering firebrands and ashes this way and that. But that did not disperse the thick blue-white cloud of willow smoke that drifted up very slowly into the tree top where it continued to filter out of the topmost branches. As I turned back to scatter some more dirt on my campfire site, I looked up just in time to find my fear-stricken grandfather parting the thick drooping branches of the big old tree and staring in disbelief at his youngest grandson.
"It's only me," I said plaintively and guiltily.
When I matured to high school age, in the 1950s, the medical profession was just beginning to study diet in relation to heart disease. Their findings about hard fats in the diet, indicated that too much of these substances were likely to produce heart and circulatory disease. The reports were quite tentative at the beginning and I wondered about my penchant for egg and bacon breakfasts. I kept hoping that the researchers and scientist would discover that bacon fat and egg yolks were a great boon to health. They would clear the fats from your arteries and were great for your brain development. But those results never appeared in the reports.
Most troubling of all for an egg lover, was the fact that my favored food--or at least that lovely, tasty yolk--was one of the most offending of all foods since each yolk contained about as much cholesterol that a full-grown physically active man should have in one day (@300 mg). These finding were soon to have a devastating effect on my eating habits or at least what I thought I should eat or not eat. But since I was not the most rigid of dieters --all my new knowledge caused me was a lot of anxiety and guilt.
My new found knowledge was rejected by my egg loving parents. No one could or would believe that the lovely yolk of an egg could possible be harmful. My mother never did acquiesce to my thinking on that issue. She continued to believe that the yolk was necessary for good digestion of the white and that they were both "good" for you. When I explained my findings to my dad he simply ignored me. He happily went on eating his favored breakfasts without guilt or worry. I had no hope to sway grandpa's thinking and he kept eating his six or eight or ten eggs a day. But I tried mightily to reduce my egg yolk count. First limiting my eggs to just two. Then later to trying to eat only the whites and not the yolks. But all too often I would cheat. I did cut back on thick-cut bacon, and tried to find butter substitutes that were composed of less saturated fats. All in all I was not too successful. But then grandpa died of a stroke at age 64 and a decade later my own father died of a stroke at age 52.
I tired harder. But old habits are difficult to extirpate. Today I am restricted to egg beaters, or egg whites only, and eat no butter or margarine. When I order an omelette in a restaurant I make sure to say "egg white omelette" not egg beater since I can not trust them to actually use the egg beaters .....but no one can fool you with white eggwhites.
Today that old flame with eggs has not left me. I continue with my l'affaire. Now and then I will have a nice poached egg and cook it hard so the yolk and white can be separated. But I continue to yearn for a whole egg with a drippy, tasty, fatty, cholesterol soaked yolk. If I eat one, I know I will enjoy it, but then, I will suffer guilt pangs all day thinking of those long chains of cholesterol slinking through my arteries to find a nice plaque to adhere to and cause a blockage.
Ahh if only I had been brought up to savor Cheerios rather than eggs...it would have been a safer life, less guilt and worry----but oh so less satisfying.
Get the picture?
Rjk
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