Wonderful things even a metaphorical egg can do
Mr Woodhouse was wont to say, 'An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome', adding in compliments to his cook, a much-tried, patient and sensible woman, 'Serie understands boiling an egg better than anybody. I wouldn't recommend an egg boiled by anybody else.' But nowadays if I ask for a boiled egg I am told, 'Aren't you afraid of the cholesterol? Do you think it wise?' A good job cholesterol did not exist in Mr Woodhouse's day. It is exactly the kind of point on which he would have seized to ban eggs, whether boiled by Serie or anyone else, from his table.
Personally I take no notice of cholesterol. I regard a boiled egg as the nicest of all foods, and perfectly healthy. It was also the favourite dish of George III, as the famous cartoon by Gillray reminds us. Indeed the only worry with a boiled egg is the necessity to demolish it, for an egg is a beautiful and perfect object, a miracle of design. I am amazed they are so cheap. On the other side of the hill from my house in the Quantocks — on what I still call the Bron Waugh side, though, alas, poor Bron is no longer there — is a smallholding where live a mass of pretty white hens of a special kind that produce eggs even the fastidious Mr Woodhouse would have pronounced of superlative quality. The eggs when gathered are placed inside an old fridge near the back door, and priced at between 50p and £1 a dozen, depending on the season. You take your eggs and drop the coin through the letterbox. This is one of those arrangements which make living in the English countryside still a delight.
Despite its low price, the ordinary twoounce hen's egg provides food value which almost defies belief. It has six grams of protein, nearly a fifth of an adult's daily requirement, plus 12 grams of fat—SO calories. It also contains iron, thiamine, riboflavin and vitamins A and D. It is not only a food in itself but the means whereby a vast variety of foods can be constructed, in the first place because the protein in its liquid albumen coagulates when it is heated. Thus many kinds of cakes are aerated when, in the oven, trapped hot air expands in lightly beaten egg-whites. In general eggs are essential for any kind of lightness and fluffiness in food. You cannot, for instance, make souffles or meringues without eggs. All batters need eggs. They act as a kind of delicious glue when you want to dip food in breadcrumbs. They are the best of all thickenings for soups.
Eggs also perform an important function to help a terrine. for instance, to maintain its shape when cooking. When you are making ice cream you need eggs to prevent the formation of large crystals of ice. Eggs bind substances together in sauces to keep things smooth and stable. When you are making stock. egg-white keeps the liquid clear. In fact, much of the basic chemistry of cuisine, whether low or high, would be impossible without egg yolks and whites or both together. One wonders how civilisation did without the egg — badly, I suspect. But to find an eggless world you would have to go far back into the second millennium Bc, when wild fowl from the Indian jungle became domesticated and evolved into the hen we know. So the Egyptian labourers who built the Pyramids did not go to work on an egg. Nor did the Aztecs or Incas, since it was Columbus who brought the hen to the western hemisphere on his second voyage in 1493. But Greeks and Romans, Medes and Persians wolfed them in prodigious quantities, and the egg must be one of the few foods never to have been banned by any system of religious diet. If it is true that the French are turning against eggs — for cholesterol reasons — then it is an amazing reversal of form for a people who have found more ways of cooking them than any other folk. Thomas Moore in his The Fudge Family in Paris says that France 'has taught us 685 ways to dress eggs'. And that is not counting dishes involving eggs used for constructive purposes.
The number of eggs produced and used in food increases all the time, but individual consumption of eggs, boiled, poached, fried and scrambled, has been declining for half a century. More health foodscares have been directed at eggs than at any other comestible, and most of them have turned out to be phoney. Thus, the cholesterol content of a whole large egg is about 216 mg, and that is a lot less than was calculated in the late 1980s, when the anti-egg campaign first got going. In addition, the content has been lowered by careful genetic selection and systematic improvements in hen diets. I would guess that the risk to anyone who eats a boiled egg every morning at breakfast is nil. Equally, the danger from salmonella bacteria is almost entirely due to what happens to the egg after it is laid, and should be eliminated by proper washing and sanitising of eggs when they are collected. No doubt there is a tiny risk in eating the delicious eggs I get in the Quantocks. But to hell with it! Risk is part of life, inseparable from growth, change, improvement, pleasure and glory. Once you start trying to eliminate risk from your life there is no stopping. You end up like Howard Hughes, a multimillionaire who spent his last miserable years stark naked in a sterilised room, living off gruel (thin, but not too thin', as Mr Woodhouse put it) and cocooned in a sea of paper tissues.
What did the poet Cowper mean by 'a Roman meal — a radish and an egg'? A bit meagre by 18th-century English standards but a splendid snack, containing nearly all the body needs. And what argument was Diderot, the encyclopaedist, deploying when he said, 'Consider this egg. It will overturn all the schools of theology and all the temples of the earth.' I suppose he was having a preDarwinian crack at belief in revealed religion. But I'm not so sure that the study of eggs, however ancient, tells us much about the existence of God. To me, an egg is an extraordinary thing, so delicate yet so powerful in its utility, it suggests that nothing short of a Supreme Being could have brought it into existence.
Among other properties, the egg demonstrates that Margaret Thatcher does have a sense of humour. When she was prime minister she attended the 50th anniversary dinner of the Institute for Economic Affairs. This was a large, self-important and tedious occasion, at which hundreds of men in black ties ate their way through half-a-dozen leisurely courses and then listened to many speeches. Mrs Thatcher, to her mounting irritation (and mine), discovered she was the last of ten speakers, each told to take not more than three minutes but going on for ten. At last she got up, and said with a voice like a whiplash of steel, 'As the last of ten speakers, and the only woman, I will say this. The cock may crow but it's the hen who lays the eggs.' There was stunned silence, broken by a hoot of laughter from me, with a sheepish few joining in.
Some time later I was in Seoul, attending a dinner given by the Revd Moon. There were Mrs Moon, many young Moons and other disciples. Asked if Mrs Thatcher was a feminist, I replied with the above story. Again there was a stunned silence, and the table turned to Revd Moon for a lead. He hesitated for a long moment. Then, suddenly, Mrs Moon — hitherto silent throughout the meal, as was her wont — saw the joke and broke into a roar of laughter. Slowly and reluctantly Moon himself began to laugh too, and then lesser moons and satellites. It took an egg to create this moment in cultural history.
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