Login | Register

"It always gets worse just before it gets better"; thus sang a grand old bar band, Chris Moffa and the Competition, in a grand old pop song, "You Know How Hot It's Been Getting 'Round Here," and once again the wisdom of the universe is made manifest in a three-minute tune.  I'm not about to play with fate by saying that things are better, or worse.  I will say that things chez PTMYB have been pretty damn crunchy this summer (although that crunchiness does not extend to Lloyd, who is, in Bunni's words, "professionally wonderful", and it's about time for them to get better.  It's time to remember that there is a point to getting out of bed in the morning, slinging hash at the box factory all day long, coming home and cracking the books.  It's time for fresh thought...which, of course, is why I'm reprinting this essay, which originally ran on December 3, 2004.

Those of you who are relative newcomers to PTMYB may wonder why I am so fascinated with eggs. Until roughly this time last year, I never thought that eggs would become such a compelling object of study for me. I was a breadhead -- well, I still am and always will be a breadhead, but for the past four years or so I was pretty much an exclusive breadhead. I had visions of baking bread in my own bakehouse. I had a business plan, and a city in which to shop it around. Then one day I didn't. I didn't have enough money, I couldn't qualify for enough funding, I blinked and lost my nerve. Looking around for something to do, I applied for a long-shot deal, a month-long fellowship at a writers colony in northwest Arkansas, to be used for a creative work on eggs, underwritten by the American Egg Board. It was such a long shot that I didn't put too much thought into what kind of book I would write if the opportunity came up. Imagine my shock when Mr. Opportunity came knock knock knocking at my door, and I found myself in Arkansas, surrounded by notecards and 19th century cookbooks and no fewer than three separate treatises on chickens and eggs.

So here I am, writing a book, or at least researching it, trying to find an agent willing to take me and this madhouse project on, and still shaking my head at the absurdity and silliness and sheer, unadulterated, unexpected fun of trying to study the history of eggs in baking.

Maybe it helps if you're a baking nerd, and I'm one of the nerdiest baking nerds ever to hoist a sheet pan. A well-prepared egg is soulful food, whether turned into an omelet, perfectly buttery, plump and self-contained; poached and served on braised spinach with a slight hint of garlic; beaten, enriched and turned into a towering, trembling souffle; made into a frittata, studded with vegetables and suitable for eating hot, warm or at room temperature; or simply boiled and fitted nicely into an egg cup, waiting to be pierced with a soldier of buttered toast. But the real fun of an egg comes when you pull your butter and sugar out of the fridge and turn the oven on. Madeleine Kamman refers to eggs as "miracles in a shell," and nowhere are those miracles more evident than in baking. Depending on whether you use the white, the yolk or both; depending on how, or whether, you beat it and how you apply heat to it, an egg can add smoothness and moisture to your final product, or make it drier and crisper. It will leaven a cake, and if you treat it with care, it will leaven without the assistance of chemical leaveners like baking powder. Heated gently with sugar and milk or fruit juice, it will turn into custard, as firm or as wobbly as you like it. Beating an egg white is a nifty and dramatic trick, traces of pale viscous liquid turning into billowing foam, but it wasn't until I got my first stand mixer that I discovered how neat it was to beat whole eggs to what is called the ribbon stage, the point at which the eggs are lemony and foamy and five times their original volume, when you pull the beater off the mixer and trail a line of batter across the batter surface, that batter ribbon will stay visible for ten seconds before vanishing below the surface. One thing I love to do is make a batch of brown sugar meringues, billowy and ivory-colored. I then boil the leftover yolks and turn them into sablees, delicate sandy French butter cookies that will fall apart if so you much as squint at them, and will melt the instant they hit your tongue. A little plate of meringues and sablees is a beautiful thing, especially if it is sitting next to a bowl of raspberry fool. If the taste doesn't seduce you, the colors definitely will. And I still shake my head at the day I learned that a traditional chocolate mousse contains only chocolate and eggs, no whipped cream. At school we learned how to make "light chocolate mousse" and "rich chocolate mousse"; the light was the traditional, the rich was the one with cream added, and I was surprised at how much more I liked the traditional mousse, its softer texture, its deeper chocolate flavor. Imagine how happy I was to discover that Gina Mallet agrees with me.

If you are not familiar with Gina Mallet, allow me to introduce you. Gina Mallet is a food writer for the National Post in Canada, the former theatre critic for the Toronto Star and the author of Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World. She was born in England, to an American mother and an English father. She grew up eating well, fed by relatives and friends with fine (but not snobbish) palates and vigorous opinions, and she was lucky enough to be born at the right time to eat some of the finest cheeses, meats, vegetables and fish that a person could eat, and thus she knows just what we are losing as our food becomes safer and safer, and ever more tasteless. (If you think that this is another jeremiad by a Luddite who insists we must source all of our food from no more than 10 miles from where we live, I assure you that Ms. Mallet is brave and unflinching at examining her most deeply-held beliefs, notably her shock and disappointment to discover that the heirloom tomato she grew in her garden was tasteless and badly textured, while her friend in Pennsylvania raises bright and flavorful tomatoes from a seed hybrid she buys from Agway.) She is a tough, smart, grand writer.

Unfortunately, the story that that tough, smart grand writer tells is a sad one, and every time I think that I've heard this sad story before -- the disappearance of raw farmhouse cheeses, the deplorable conditions of egg factories (to call them "farms" or "ranches" now feels like a cruel joke), the bizarre produce distribution system that, along with the Alar scare, eviscerated the once-glorious apple producing regions of Washington State -- she has something new to tell, something to which I'm glad to have been alerted while simultaneously wishing I'd never heard about it. Today's food production and agricultural policies are driven by the global marketplace, not just in terms of an increased number of foods being available from an increasing number of markets, but also in terms of food being produced to a single homogenized standard, meant to be consumed by billions of people around the world, compromised in an increasingly futile attempt to render it pathogen-free:

As a child, I happily drank raw milk. For several years, it was considered the greatest of treats. In Shillingford, on Thursday afternoons, my sister and I used to stop at the farm on our way home from school. We would tap on the kitchen window, which was flung up by Cally, the farmer's cousin, a ringer for Glinda, the Good Witch of the North in the movie The Wizard of Oz, and she would beckon us into the sparkling tiled dairy, which smelled of washing. On a big wooden table lay large, shallow, stainless-steel pans of milk with cream rising slowly to the surface. Thecream was the color of daffodils. The cows were the superrich Jerseys and Guernseys. Cally poured us a glass of fresh milk still warm from the cow, and it was so good. The milk smelled earthy and complex -- today, I'd call it sexy -- and so rich compared to the gray stuff we usually drank. Then Cally would hand us each a piece of fresh bread, spread with farm butter and homemade strawberry jam, and lay on it a layer of the heavy cream that spread like cheese. This was quite simply the best food we had all week.

Raw milk, as I told a food scientist I know, is a cocktail with as many hints of vegetables and herbs as V-8 Juice, a meal in itself. He would have none of it. "You think it's safe, but it isn't. It's packed with bacteria. We're finding more bacteria all the time. You were lucky. For some reason, you're resistant to bacteria, but others won't be. You must remember we live in a global market now and there are thousands, millions of people who will never have had raw milk, won't be able to digest it, and may die as a result."

I thought he was overreacting until I found out that his reaction was public health dogma throughout North America. Tom Szalkucki, the assistant director of the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin, gave me the reasons. He skipped over the cosmic bacterial menace for more practical matters. From a public health point of view, uniformity is essential for safety, and no regulatory agency such as the Food and Drug Administration can allow the sale of any food that is not safe for everyone. A pathogen in raw milk cheese could hurt those with AIDS, those on chemotherapy, the old. The old, Szalkucki reminded me, and now the fastest-growing segment of the North American population and the fastest-growing population in all the industrial countries, a triumph of health science. I had a sudden vision of aged people keeling over from a taste of raw milk cheese.

Now, of course I don't want to see aged people keeling over from a taste of raw milk cheese, and I don't want wholesale keeling over due to lethal pathogens, but I am more than a little worn out by our food policy being dictated by bacterophobes, particularly when some of the most lethal pathogens out there entered our food supply by our push to industrialize our food...which brings me back to our friend the egg. There are two reasons to eat eggs -- and I'm talking gastronomic reasons, not health reasons: 1. You like the taste of eggs; 2. You like what eggs contribute to your baked goods in terms of leavening and thickening power. What, then, are we to make of this?

You don't have to be a hen-hugger to suspect that nature was biting back with Salmonella E(nterides). Industrialized humans crammed together in slums with bad snitation were prey to many diseases of close proximity, notably typhoid fever. Why shouldn't it be the same for hens?...But the egg industry was less interested in finding the root cause of Salmonella E than in stopping it. In Europe, the hens were vaccinated. In North America, everything that could be cleansed was cleansed again, and warning bulletins about egg handling were broadcast widely. Salmonella E hasn't disappeared, but it has declined. According to the American Egg Board, the chance of anyone getting infected by an egg in America is about 1 in 20,000, and then if you're healthy, you probably won't get sick at all.

Even so, an industrial solution has to be found. In some parts of the United States, shell eggs are already being pasteurized. A computerized conveyor belt passes the eggs through successive baths of water, heated from 144F to 162F in order to destroy any pathogens. Pasteurization, of course, also wipes out any egg taste. The American Egg Board encourages the use of these eggs, even if they don't quite look right. The board advises: "The heating process may create cloudiness in the whites and increase the beating time for foam formation. When you separate pasteurized shell eggs for beating, allow up to about four times as much time for the full foam formation to occur, as you would in the whites of regular eggs."

The final solution is the irradiated egg. Irradiating eggs, or any food for that matter, is similar to radiation therapy. It is not likely to be good for an egg any more than a gamma ray is good for a human. But gamma rays, electrons, or X-rays that are beamed through the eggs will knock out all pathogens. The Food and Drug Administration admits that eggs lose 24 percent of their vitamin A when exposed to just one third of the approved level of radiation. The yolks of an irradiated egg are watery and dim, and the egg itself is no longer the cook's little helper. The irradiated egg is more difficult to cook, requires more time to whip, and yields angelfood cakes with half the volume.

If the eggs of our future don't taste like eggs, don't contain the nutrients of eggs, and don't leaven or thicken like eggs, why in the world would we continue eating them, outside of sheer dull, repetitive habit? Can we even continue to call them eggs?

Addendum (9/9/05):  The picture below has been run in this space even more than the infamous egg yolks posted above, but I just can't resist running it one more time.  As soon as I get some quality time to look at a calendar, I am planning my return to Arkansas; come 2006, I will be back, and the first thing I will do when I get there is sweet-talk the airport shuttle driver into making one stop for me before we get to the Colony, a stop at Bill's Pharmacy, home of the best eggs I have ever had, and probably ever will.