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?”