Thursday, October 14, 2004
Dear friends, after a late summer and early fall full of torpor and bad attitude, I have finally managed to light that fire underneath me, and I have resumed my egg research. Eventually I will have new goodies to share with you, but for now I have this shameless recycling of my warmup exercises, written on the deck of my suite at the Colony, under the mimosa trees, in the midst of the path of dragonflies and bees the size of soybean pods, within earshot of the trolley that ran by my front door once every 15 minutes. Despite my earlier promises, I probably won’t be back next year; I probably won’t be back for another 18 months, but I will be back, and I will be in a writing mood. The questions I ask below will not necessarily make it into the final draft, but they are my jumping-off point. Thanking you in advance for not laughing at them.
Started my first brioche at WCDH at 12:30 on Saturday, June 19. Parloa recipe calls for “7 large eggs or 8 small ones” which I interpret to 14 oz. I use the eggs from the drugstore, range of peewee to large. I have 9, weighing out to 11 3/8 ounces. It is a bit nervewracking, but not overly so, to figure out whether I have enough (I have water to use for backup, just in case). I can see where the push toward absolute standardization comes from. I understand the lure of scientific certainty, the knowledge that your egg is going to weigh as close to 2 ounces as it absolutely, positively can. At the same time, I think that that scientific certainty is the same kind of crutch that cookbooks have become, where we place so much faith in something external that we have no faith in our own powers of observation, our ability to gauge whether we have enough of something. We have lost patience with trial and error. We have lost patience with learning.
Of course, it is easy for me to say this, because I have a certain relationship with food and cooking, and it is certainly not universal. For everyone who cooks either for the pleasure of it or for the challenge of acquiring a new skill (or both), there are two or five or ten more who just want something to eat, who have fractional amounts of energy, who have invested ingredients and time and want a guaranteed return on both. It is hard to say to them, “just pay attention to what you’re doing, and if it needs this, add this.” Even I have trouble with this from time to time: witness the brioche I’m making now, totally without assistance of KitchenAid (I can’t find the dough hook to the spiffy 6-quart mixer). I am using an antique recipe, and I have no real reference point for whether the dough is correct. It’s hard to trust yourself when you don’t know what you’re doing. This brings me back around to my original thought: How did we get to this point? Why do we not trust in what we’re doing? Why have we delegated swaths of our experience to experts? Why do we need an absolutely consistently-sized egg?
For that matter, why do we need eggs? It sounds like an odd question, and it is, considering that I have been baking for such a long time that I do view eggs as an absolute necessity; as I told the AEB, it is impossible to imagine a pastry kitchen without eggs. And when I say “why do we need them?” I’m not talking about their food value, or their role in history, or mythology, or folklore or apothecary. I want to know who wants them.
I have just arrived at the point where I am starting to look at numbers. The intense industrialization of poultry farming in the 20th century was supposedly driven by the consumer’s clamorous demand for eggs. I love Fran Gage’s book A Sweet Quartet: Sugar, Almonds, Eggs, and Butter, but her chapter on eggs, thoughtful and informative though it is, answers fewer questions than it asks. “Nature’s way takes too long when there is an arms-folded, foot-tapping population demanding fresh eggs every day. Who wants to wait for a hen to take more than fifteen days to lay a clutch of eggs, perhaps as many as fifteen, settle down on them for three weeks until they hatch, then spend several more weeks raising the chicks, and not lay any eggs in the meantime? To an old-fashioned hen, this is the natural way to proceed, but people want an uninterrupted supply of eggs.” Exactly who is doing the foot-tapping here? Who wants these eggs, and in what form? My numbers are all scattershot, unpulled-together, but I am getting a basic sense of volume: In 1920, the city of Petaluma, CA alone produced 22,250,000 dozen eggs. That translates to 267 million eggs. One city produced an egg for every person in the U.S., and while Petaluma was the nerve center of West Coast egg production, the “Egg Basket of the World,” it was far from the only city in the U.S., or even in the Petaluma Valley area, that was producing eggs. In 1942 the citizens of New York City consumed over 174 million dozen eggs, or just over 2 billion. In 2002, during a time when home baking was supposedly in a steep decline, when flour sales were soft, and when the resurgence in egg acceptability thanks to the Atkins diet was not quite cancelled out by lingering fears of dietary cholesterol, total U.S. egg production was 87 1/4 billion eggs. Again I ask: who is tapping their feet, demanding a constant and everready supply of eggs? How many of these are going to large-scale institutions? The military? The makers of processed packaged foods? Is this where the demand really lies? Are we all tapping our feet impatiently, demanding an uninterrupted supply of Duncan Hines cake mix? Or those grotesque eggs-in-a-tube that were test-marketed at Wawa about five years ago, targeted at commuters and long-drivers, who reacted to them with delight? Is it really true that we are demanding this stuff after all, that the poultry industry is right in saying “we cram as many hens together as we can and keep them laying as long as possible and slaughter newly-hatched male White Leghorns en masse because you folks want your eggs every day?”
At this point it seems apropos to pass along a little second-hand anecdote that I heard last weekend. (With the caveat that it’s just an anecdote.)
I made an offhand comment to a friend about how I was enjoying the near-perfect carnitas I was eating so much so that I felt a) obliged to offer my thanks to the pig who’d given its precious life to make such a delicacy, and b) almost willing to forgive the evil factory pig farmers you hear are destroying the huge chunks of the midwest and other places, a la That Old Ace in the Whole by Annie Proulx.
Said friend said that he knows a man who’s conscientious about what he eats and who decided to go learn about pork. He visited a couple “factory farms” and found farmers who had made some sacrifices for mass production, but who generally respected the animals, let them move around fairly freely, did not force animals into squallid conditions and where smells, waste treatment, etc. were well within what the average person would consider reasonable.
I’m not saying we’re definitely being sold a bill of goods nor that we’re not. I’m just wondering if you’ve had the chance to employ a healthy skepticism and a reporter/food-lover/author/pragmatist’s eye and looked into things for yourself.
Where should 87.25 billion eggs come from? And where are they coming from? Assuming we want/need that many eggs, how much resources, time, space, transportation, etc. would it take to do it differently? Are there alternative sources of the protein and the other good stuff that’s in even mediocre eggs? What else would the Bakerina use for the egg wash on her bread? Would she have us eat that abominable chemical angelfood cake (sic) they sell at supermarkets?
Riddle me that.
Wow. I’m very glad I didn’t take this post down after all. The morning after I posted it, I thought “egad! What am I doing, posting my brain droppings in a place where people might read them? Jen, you eeeeeediot!” (I will allow that Lloyd’s recent purchase of the Ren & Stimpy box set may have informed the tone a bit. 
Mr. ‘mouse and Miz goliard definitely raise good issues here. My intention was not to issue a screed about factory farms, although it’s impossible to study food history and politics without considering factory farms, and it is difficult to study factory farms without forming an opinion about them, pro or con. I have a friend who is a vegetarian, and she said if I were really offended by factory farming, I would give up animal products in their entirety, but I would much rather route my dollar toward farms that practice less intensive methods of farming—and yes, even by factory-farm standards, chicken farming is very, very intensive. This of course makes me a moving target, because I have enough money to pay a little extra for my meat and eggs, and the inclination to search them out. If I were on a fixed income, and if I were solely reliant on my local supermarket, I might be a little more sanguine about the whole issue.
‘mouse, I know this doesn’t really answer any of your questions, which I will answer as soon as I can give them some careful consideration. Suffice it to say that nobody should eat that chemical angel cake abomination, ever.
goliard, your words remind me of that scene in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” where Ichabod Crane looks at all the animals gambolling about on the Van Tassel farm, and he envisions them gambolling about in their “food” forms: the pigs running around with apples in their mouths, the ducks swimming in gravy, the doves snuggling under a pie crust blanket.
ann, I love that costume! I’ll probably save it for next year, though, when the gym time becomes a bit more evident. 
witho, we do indeed have apple crumble over here, although the ‘mericans call it apple crisp. It is one of my favorite things to make, and I often make it when I have too much going on to make a pie, but still crave something appley and buttery and crunchy and baked. As you mentioned, it lends itself to improvisation very well. Sounds like yours was indeed marvelous. I’ll bet you get terrific apples—yet another thing I envy about you folks on the other side of the Atlantic from me.
Bak, indeed, you still ducked my main question. Have you visited the variety of egg farms that exist out there? Perhaps Petaluma should be on the Spring tour.
I’m asking not to be rude—I just rely on you to educate me, and I ain’t planning to visit no stinkin’ chicken farm on my next vacation.
Goliard, you are a woman after my heart. Wanna throw on some old jeans and go wrassle our dinner into submission?
Okay, Counselor, point taken.
Seriously, I do have an invitation to visit the chicken farm that has a stand at the greenmarket where I buy my eggs. I haven’t gone yet because I’m out of vacation, and the only day I can go is Saturday, and the farm is a long drive (4+ hours) away. That said, since I don’t foresee going back to the Colony until 2006, I *do* plan on visiting stinkin’ chicken farms on my vacation in 2005. I’m going to visit some smallish (1,000 or fewer chickens) farms, and if I could get into either a Bell & Evans or Murray’s facility, that would be great. Unfortunately, it’s tricky to get into bigger places because admitting visitors increases the risk of infection to the flocks. Some places, such as Michael Foods, won’t allow any outsiders to view the animals at all because they need to maintain as sterile conditions as possible.
Petaluma won’t be on the tour, though, as Petaluma’s days as Egg Basket to the World are far behind it. The majority of our eggs these days come from Iowa, Arkansas (but much of that business may be moving to Missouri), other regions of California and the Del*mar*va peninsula.
Again, I’m only offering the most superficial observations on an issue that deserves a much more complex answer. I understand that yes, there is a need for eggs, and it’s a big one, getting bigger every year, so big that we can’t scale back to a completely bucolic approach. At the same time, though, I do think we have made some tradeoffs for availability and convenience that end up stripping chickens of their, for lack of a better word, chickenness. Smith and Daniel said that as a result of selective breeding and manipulation of light cycles (among other factors), the chicken has become a product of industry, like a galosh or a bar of soap. Believe me, if I can find a farm in the next year that can raise chickens and produce eggs on a large scale and still do it humanely—even having to make concessions to mass production—I will shout out from the rooftops about them. In the meantime, though, I have been reading a lot of literature from egg companies like Michael Foods and Sunnyland Foods, who make a lot of noise about their value-added egg products but very little about the taste of those products, or about the eggs themselves, or about how those eggs are hatched. The end result only serves to distance us further from the real sources of our food. It is one thing to not make the connection between the egg and the chicken from which it came, but it is another to not make the connection between your grill-marked egg patty and the original egg in the shell. I fear I’m sounding like some kind of Luddite harpy, but considering that I’ve been reading food trade journals in which these companies brag about how shell egg sales are way down, and value-added is the wave of a bright new future, well, then, maybe I *am* some kind of Luddite harpy. Which instances your point—I need to get me to a chicken ranch, but soon.
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At this point it seems apropos to pass along a little second-hand anecdote that I heard last weekend. (With the caveat that it’s just an anecdote.)
I made an offhand comment to a friend about how I was enjoying the near-perfect carnitas I was eating so much so that I felt a) obliged to offer my thanks to the pig who’d given its precious life to make such a delicacy, and b) almost willing to forgive the evil factory pig farmers you hear are destroying the huge chunks of the midwest and other places, a la That Old Ace in the Whole by Annie Proulx.
Said friend said that he knows a man who’s conscientious about what he eats and who decided to go learn about pork. He visited a couple “factory farms” and found farmers who had made some sacrifices for mass production, but who generally respected the animals, let them move around fairly freely, did not force animals into squallid conditions and where smells, waste treatment, etc. were well within what the average person would consider reasonable.
I’m not saying we’re definitely being sold a bill of goods nor that we’re not. I’m just wondering if you’ve had the chance to employ a healthy skepticism and a reporter/food-lover/author/pragmatist’s eye and looked into things for yourself.
Where should 87.25 billion eggs come from? And where are they coming from? Assuming we want/need that many eggs, how much resources, time, space, transportation, etc. would it take to do it differently? Are there alternative sources of the protein and the other good stuff that’s in even mediocre eggs? What else would the Bakerina use for the egg wash on her bread? Would she have us eat that abominable chemical angelfood cake (sic) they sell at supermarkets?
Riddle me that.