Now it can be told, or rather, retold, because it’s been told before, but I now have an answer to all of those people who asked if my Egg Board Fellowship project would be about “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Har de har har. Well, guess what, smarties: it was the egg. I know this because today I did something I should have done weeks ago: I went to McGee. That would be Harold McGee, author of 1984’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, the book that no culinary school graduate worth his/her salt can do without. Here is just a fraction of what he has to say about eggs:
The first eggs were released, fertilized, and hatched in the oceans, and the protective membrane could be relatively simple because the egg’s environment was the same mild salt solution as its parent’s.
As animal life developed and diversified, it made important adaptations to new environments. The amphibians could move and breathe on land, but had to return to the water in order to reproduce; their eggs would dry up in the open air. Some time during the Carboniferous period, around 250 million years ago, the earliest fully land-dwelling animals, the reptiles, developed a self-containing egg with a tough, leathery skin that prevented fatal water loss. The eggs of birds, animals that arose some 100 million years later, are a refined version of this reproductive adaptation to life on land. (Mammals, including humans, make use of an alternative strategy; the embryo is retained inside the mother’s body until its development is largely complete and it can breathe air on its own.)
Eggs, then, are millions of years older than birds. Gallus domesticus, the chicken more or less as we know it, is only a scant 4 or 5 thousand years old, a latecomer even among the domesticated animals (sheep and goats go back twice as far). Its background is, however, more exotic than most. The chicken’s immediate ancestors were several types of jungle fowl native to Southeast Asia or India, where it was first bred.
Maybe it is just because I am a silly people at heart, but I am positively captivated by the idea of tree-dwelling jungle chickens. I wonder if the Egg Board folks will let me branch out a bit. So to speak.
Kitchen News: I have received so many e-mails about the Twenty Hour Apples that I decided to go ahead and make a batch. They went into the oven about half an hour ago, and should be ready for consumption tomorrow night. I am embarrassed to admit how much I’m looking forward to them. I also managed to revive my sourdough starters, which I thought I had killed by leaving them out without feeding them. Usually if I know that my schedule precludes a regular 12-hour feeding schedule, I’ll pop them back in the fridge, but this week I managed to forget both their feeding schedule and their newly out-of-fridge status. I am a bad Sourdough Mom. But today I fed them, fed them well, begged for their forgiveness and promised to pay for their psychotherapy if only they promised not to blame all of their problems on me. Not that I have a sourdough disorder or anything like that. Heaven forfend.
The Return of Pop Music Love: VH1 Classic is showing the video for “Inside Out” by the Mighty Lemon Drops, from the World Without End album. Back in 1988, I loved that song so much that I wore out the cassette. I had a job on the newspaper in my little redneck mountain town, where I’d returned after college, and I spent a lot of time on the road, driving from township supervisors’ meetings to county commissioners’ meetings to zoning board meetings, all staggeringly exciting stuff for a 20-year-old woman, you bet. I would emerge from these meetings around 10 o’clock every night, bored stupid, facing a long drive home and the prospect of trying to write something interesting about all this foofaraw in the morning. I’d get in the car, pop World Without End into the stereo and let “Inside Out” propel me home, through dark woods and under starry skies, singing and smiling.