A few thoughts about eggs. 9 March 2007 7:02 pm
Posted by Tracy in : cooking, eating, eggs, health, ingredients, responsibility, restaurants, work , trackbackI grew up with the idea that a person shouldn’t, or maybe even couldn’t, eat more than one egg at a time. In fact, I can remember a quiz question on the subject in one of my Suske en Wiske comic books (Belgian, but popular with kids in the Netherlands, too): how many eggs could a person eat on “een nuchtere maag” — an empty stomach. Of course, logically, the answer is one, but due to a combination of literal-mindedness and less than entirely awesome Dutch reading skills (okay, technically Flemish, since as previously mentioned Suske and Wiske are Belgian) I took this as further proof that one egg was some kind of physiological limit for a long time. To this day, I get self-conscious about eating more than one egg at once, try to avoid eating eggs at more than one meal per day, and generally try to average eating at most one egg a day (I’ll only eat multiple eggs at a time if I haven’t had any in awhile, or I try not to eat any for a few days after, stupid obsessive-compulsive stuff like that). On the one hand, this is pretty sane dietary practice on my part, but on the other hand it’s not like I eat a ton of animal fats, so I probably don’t really have to worry about cholesterol — at least until menopause, when family history predicts I’ll be singing the doom song. But I digress.
I didn’t grow up with the idea of eggs as breakfast food; they weren’t part of my family’s usual Northern European-style morning spread of bread, cold cuts, and cheese (I’m guessing most of you reading have no idea the confusion this caused in my kindergarten peers, who all had cereal for breakfast and simply could not believe that my family and I had sandwiches). Eggs, to my mind, were a special lunch food, or a quick and easy dinner. Also, for a very long time, I thought “omelet” was another word for “spiegelei” or sunny-side up egg. But again I digress. But here’s the thing, a thing I should perhaps have worked into this essay a little earlier. I love eggs. So you can bet I learned to eat them for breakfast eventually, because hey, another chance to eat something I love. And in many places — say, my college dining hall, eggs were only available for breakfast or brunch, or very rare “breakfast for dinner” nights. If I wanted a fried egg sandwich for dinner, I usually had to make it in my dorm room. (Eventually I had to make all my fried egg sandwiches in my dorm room when the dining halls went over to exclusively using cartons of pasteurized egg stuff due to unfortunate Salmonella reasons. It was a total bummer, to put it mildly.) Still, none of this really prepared me to become a professional breakfast cook.
At the Glenwood, and I suspect many other restaurants (Morning Glory included, for that matter), a standard omelet is made with three eggs. Three eggs! I’m used to it now, but I still get incredulous, and when I first started cooking breakfast for a living, I would frequently wonder how those omelets didn’t make people sick. Upon hearing about them, my grandmother incredulously asked, “Op een nuchtere maag?” Yes, Oma, my customers eat three-egg omelets on an empty stomach. At the Glenwood, sometimes they even get them filled with sausage or bacon, or add those meats on the side.
Of course, most people don’t go out to breakfast every day, and most people definitely don’t eat eggs every day, let alone in crazy oversized restaurant-meal quantities (and restaurant portions are enormous way more of the time than just breakfast, but that’s mostly neither here nor there). If folks are only going out for breakfast once a week, tops, and they’re eating cereal the rest of the time, maybe it averages out okay. That’s what I try to tell myself, anyway. As a professional cook, I’m an enabler of people’s food habits, and one of my reasons for leaving the Glenwood was my increasing discomfort at enabling people who wanted to eat three (or sometimes more) eggs wrapped around sausage, with a side of bacon. While I may not want to eat everything on the menu at Morning Glory, at least I will never have a customer substitute their toast and home fries for dead pig in any form. And that’s a wonderful thing.
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Matt Brubeck
