‘Eggs are rarely as simple as they seem’

From the January 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

One of the first dishes cooked on television was an omelette. On the evening of 21 January 1937, for the first episode of Cook’s Night Out, the restaurateur and food writer Marcel Boulestin went live on the BBC for 15 minutes with a supporting cast of eggs and butter. Early broadcasts were not recorded, but Boulestin’s style is easily inferred from his 78rpm recording of the same cooking process: precise, punctilious and deadpan. ‘The omelette which is like scrambled eggs wrapped up in a pancake is not a good omelette,’ he says.

That pitfalls lie in wait for anyone boiling, poaching or scrambling eggs, or indeed making an omelette, has long been a touchstone of cookery writing. In 1942 the American writer M.F.K. Fisher instructed her readers ‘How Not to Boil an Egg’. Forty years later came Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, with its author at once beckoning and admonishing the home cook with the egg that she is bran- dishing on the cover. Elizabeth David sent a friend instructions for scrambled eggs in the guise of a free-verse poem. Eggs are rarely as simple as they seem.

‘In cooking – as in almost everything else – it all starts with an egg,’ writes the chef Ruth Reichl in the foreword to The Gourmand’s Egg. A Collection of Stories & Recipes (Taschen), the first in a series of single-ingredient volumes devised by the editors of the eponymous food magazine. This is neither a straightforward cookery book, although about half of its pages are given over to recipes, nor a social and eco- nomic history in the manner of recent books about, say, herring, mustard or yoghurt (all in the Edible Series from Reaktion Books). Instead, through its abundance of illustrations, The Gourmand’s Egg celebrates the egg as form, image, symbol – and above all as an inexhaustible cultural reference point.

The Gourmand is one of a number of independent magazines, among them Gather Journal and Luncheon, which have over the past decade or so brought the high production values of fashion magazines to bear on food culture. More than its peers, perhaps, this title goes in for stylised photography that playfully reimagines ingredients as installation art, promoting kitchen staples to cover stars. The blown-up fried egg that graces the cover of the book makes for a grotesque but compelling image: it looks like an aerial photograph of some island that Gulliver might one day wash up on.

Fried egg, photographed by Bobby Doherty, and featured in The Gourmand’s Egg. A Collection of Stories & Recipes. Courtesy Taschen; photo: Bobby Doherty