A soft-boiled egg.
i just ate a soft-boiled egg like a real British person.
sort of.
in today's Sunday Times (London Times, not New York, of course) i read a little column written by British actress Emma Thompson. in it she spoke ever-so-reverently about the eating of a soft-boiled egg.
i have seen a lot of egg cups around the shops in England and i've wondered: why do British people eat partially-cooked eggs in tiny cups directly out of the eggshell using little spoons when it's so much easier to scramble, fry or hard-boil and peel an egg?
i asked my British partner to make me one -- he obliged.
we do not own "egg cups" so we had to sort-of balance the just-boiled eggs in small ramekins. i was told to tap the edges of the egg all around until i could lift the top of the eggshell off like a lid.
this was every bit as hard as it sounds.
trying to hold the hot egg in place burned my fingertips. also, tapping an eggshell with the edge of a spoon all around the top edge, so as to crack off a perfect little lid isn't as easy as British people make it look. my eggshell sort-of crumbled under the pressure of me smacking it, but i did get an opening in the top. partial success.
trying to scoop the egg white out from inside the shell left me a bit concerned that my next bite would have a fragment of shell in it, or worse, that i was wasting the precious egg by not scraping enough of the egg white out properly with my spoon.
it seemed like a lot of trouble just to eat one egg.
the deal was that i would be made a soft-boiled egg if i promised to blog about it. so this is my blog.
the egg DOES taste yummy when runny and eaten with a spoon. yes, indeed.
is it worth all the effort involved in actually getting the egg out of (or off of) the shell?
i'm not convinced.
but hey -- i'm trying.
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