Jonathan Schofield goes crazy about eggs and recalls Michel Roux
Happy World Egg Day and weekend.
Egg.
Oeuf.
Why the celebration? Apparently, it is ‘an opportunity to make everyone aware that eggs are an excellent, affordable source of high-quality nutrition. An egg is one of the most environmentally sustainable and cost-effective animal-source proteins available.’
Agreed. Eggs are one reason why I could never be a vegan.
Egg is a daft word in its terse simplicity, its elegant sufficiency. The word comes to English from Old Norse: maybe Vikings would slay people with axes while carrying all their eggs in one basket, some of the Vikings would be bad eggs and some good eggs while others were like the curate’s egg, good in parts.
Eggs are idiomatic like no other food. To egg someone on, to get egg on your face, a chicken and egg situation, to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, to walk on eggshells, a nest egg, can’t boil an egg. They can be anatomical too, ‘huevos’ in Spanish is slang for testicles, in the sense of ‘he’s got balls’.
In 2005 I interviewed the late Michel Roux at the Lowry Hotel for City Life listings magazine about his 300-page book called Eggs. This was shortly before the print magazine was ditched and shortly before I ditched my association with City Life. The interview was never published.
I’ve always felt bad about this. So here’s my expiation for Michel Roux was one of the most gracious gentlemen I’ve ever met, thoughtful and considered in his opinions, although he didn't like the behaviour of some of his fellow chefs at the time.
“I respect politeness,” he said,“I respect respect. I don’t insult people in the kitchen, I encourage them, all that cursing from Gordon Ramsay is bad for the industry why would anybody be part of a brigade driven by fear.”
We moved on to eggs. I asked why he'd written a whole book about the ingredient?
Michel Roux almost went misty eyed and started to weave patterns in the air with his hands.
“Eggs are perfect,” he said, “a genius raw material, the most beautiful food, often overshadowed by more expensive, luxury products. They are full of protein, more protein for their size than any other ingredient, that is real power, yet they are also fragile, defenceless.”
He paused and then continued with: “Egg’s are vital in the kitchen, literally the glue that holds so many dishes together, they can be the main event, or part of the show and they can be the soul performer as with a simple boiled egg, a mollet egg, omelettes, poached eggs. The egg is in some ways the key to the kitchen and they come in so many beautiful forms. In the book there are recipes for hen, duck, goose, pigeon, quail and even gull and ostrich eggs.”
A few days after the interview I received a copy of the book in the post with a lovely note, some of Roux’s personal favourite recipes were marked for me. I cooked a couple of them. The mollet eggs in tomato nests with crunchy cucumber. It’s a cracking recipe that I still use.
Michel Roux was right about eggs they are the star of the show, sometimes literally. Eggs appear throughout literature and in the movies, who can forget the egg-eating scene with Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke? In nursery rhymes we have the egg that comes a cropper with Humpty Dumpty and who with Lewis Carroll becomes a grumpy Humpty in Alice through the Looking Glass.
In Jonathan Swifts’ satirical tale, Gulliver’s Travels, eggs become a casus belli between the little Lilliputians. Swift describes how it had been traditional for Lilliputians to break their boiled eggs on the larger end but a few generations earlier an Emperor of Lilliput had decreed all eggs must be broken on the smaller end after his son cut himself breaking the egg on the larger end. ‘The differences between Big-Endians (those who broke their eggs at the larger end) and Little-Endians had given rise to "six rebellions ... wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown".’
Swift is mocking futile and petty political and religious arguments that can get out of control and become sources of major conflict: it doesn’t matter in the slightest from which end you crack an egg.
In Tolkien’s The Hobbit Bilbo Baggins tries to fox Gollum with this riddle about an egg.
“A box without hinges, key, or lid/ Yet golden treasure inside is hid.”
Nonsense poet Ogden Nash put it like this.
Let's think of eggs.
They have no legs.
Chickens come from eggs
But they have legs.
The plot thickens;
Eggs come from chickens,
But have no legs under 'em.
What a conundrum!
In many religions the egg is a symbol of new life and rebirth which is why Christianity has co-opted it for Easter and Christ’s resurrection and why we eat Easter eggs.
I asked across the office for the staff’s favourite egg dishes: Georgina, pizza Fiorentina; Wayne, kedgeree; Finn, Spanish omelette; Sarah, souffle; Martyn, Gregg’s sausage and omelette roll; Mark Garner, eggs benedict; Georgie, cakes; Yousaf, lamb kofta with boiled egg; Harley, Shaksouka.
One of our favourite chefs at the Confidentials.com, Robert Owen Brown, says it has to be coddled duck egg: Morecambe Bay shrimps and smoked cheddar with a touch of cream and paprika.
Just that selection shows the versatility of the humble egg. I’ll take eggs anyway they come, but I simply can’t start the day without at least two.
There are two egg-shaped hospitality rooms in Manchester and Salford, the French in the Midland and the main room at the King’s Arms.
I'll raise a glass to Michel Roux and the humble, absurd, very well-designed and very useful oeuf.
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