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"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.

Dear friends,

Is it a fitting tribute to Labor Day that I kicked off my Labor Day weekend by ranting about LuthorCorp?  It may very well be, but today I'm going to give it a rest, or at least interrupt it with a palate cleanser as it were.  I work for a company that has plenty of its own problems, in an industry that has veritable tablets full of problems and challenges, but today I come not to rage at working for The Man, but to breathe a sigh of relief.  I come not to bury LuthorCorp, but to thank them.

It is another topic for another time, but after a summer of hectic deskmonkeying, bad moods and broken hearts, I have relaunched into the egg book research with a vengeance.  (Those of you who have known me from the start of this book, rest assured that I can hear you falling to your knees, clasping your hands, sobbing and thanking Jesus that this is another topic for another time.  Those of you who are new to this space, trust me:  eventually you will suffer for my art.    This morning I emerged from my candy-scented bubble bath and made straight for the Big Box of Notecards, which included my notes from The Chicken Book by Page Smith and Charles Daniel (a really magnificent book that deserves a post all its own).  I opened the book to page 348, the midst of a chapter about the culinary uses of chickens and eggs, and found a passage that reminded me, once again, why I am glad that I am not a manageress in the Roman Empire (for this would indeed be included in the food preparation/chicken tending/egg gathering duties of the manageress):

In case an honored visitor caught a host without a milk-fed capon or hen, according to Horace, it was only necessary to dip a tough old bird into a basin of Falernum wine and water while still alive to soften it.  The same purpose, we are told, could be served "with a fig placed in the creature's anus."*

While my job is not as difficult, dangerous or low-paying as, say, stevedoring, I am often charged with unpleasant, soul-draining tasks on LuthorCorp's behalf, such as compiling time-consuming reports, letting customers yell at us for the mistakes they've made, and enough filing to kill a stoat.  But I can say with all honesty that they have never asked me to place figs in a chicken's anus, and for that, I salute them.  Thank you, LuthorCorp!

* I am still trying to figure out what it means that when I read this, my first thought was not "Euuuuuwwwww!", but rather, "Well, figs *do* have tenderizing enzymes, and that's why they were so often paired with hams, because ham meat tends to be tough, so it kind of makes sense that...euuuuuwwwww!"

A postscript:  I shared this observation with the lovely bunni, who is blogging side-by-side with me today.  I showed her the passage in The Chicken Book; she mentioned that she actually preferred the preceding paragraph:  "The poet and physician Battista Spagnoli (Mantuanus) wrote in praise of the capon: 'The greatest glory to you, cock, when you have lost your testicles, for then you are pleasing to sleep, to the stomach, to Venus, to Cybele.'"  We are now looking forward to dropping Spagnoli's quote into as many conversations as possible.

Dear friends, text will follow later, when I am feeling a little less poorly.  I am irked by this poorly feeling, for up until tonight, it was a quiet, bittersweet weekend, made sweeter by plums.  The dark purple prune plums, a varietal known as Long John, have been baked into plum cake, which sits in the kitchen, waiting for Lloyd and me.  The rest are for eating out of hand, plunging into your mouth as soon as you realize that they're just about to trip over the line of overripeness, these fat little beauties.  The green-yellow ones are greengages, floral and buttery with a flesh like amber.  The red ones are Elephant Hearts, tart-skinned, vaguely banana-scented and with a vivid magenta flesh.  I devour bags of these every summer.  And this morning, before my vague malaise set in, I put my energy to good use:  those five pounds of damsons that came home with me last weekend were finally turned into damson jam.  Or at least it was meant to be damson jam:  quality control revealed that it had actually been cooked into damson butter, thick, heady and gorgeous.  I probably should have pureed the whole mixture, to smooth out the skins, but there was something about the faint crunch of plum skin between my teeth that made the whole thing so much more captivating.  So we have ten jars of not-quite-jam, not-quite-butter, resting nicely in the pantry.  Recipes, for both the cake and the jam, will follow as soon as I get my silly act together.  Thanking you in advance for your patience.

(Come back, Doc.  Your country needs you.)

Trying not to fiddle while Rome burns, but...While I am not a person of fixed religious abode, I recognize that good work has been done by both individuals and organizations who are of fixed religious abodes.  As often as I am disgusted by the evil that has been committed in the name of religion, so am I also awed by the good that has been done in its name as well; the dialogue is not monopolized by the likes of Fred Phelps or Meir Kahane or Osama bin Laden (who is not so much a religious figure as a hateful rich boy who has learned to talk the talk to religious fanatics), but to those who would spread love and comfort and assistance as well.  I am lucky enough to count among my friends some truly principled believers.  So why do I feel so squirrelly every time I look at my employer's approved charities list for Katrina disaster relief? 

LuthorCorp announced yesterday that they would match, dollar for dollar, any charitable contributions made by their employees supporting the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.  The only conditions were that we make all contributions by October 15, and that we make our donations to one of the 13 charities on the list.  Of these 13, three are secular:  the American Red Cross Hurricane Disaster Relief Fund, AmeriCares and PACE Helping Hands; the rest are Christian charities.  Again, I'm not trying to split moral hairs when people are starving and drowning, but -- oh, why equivocate?  Yes, I am more than a little baffled that Second Harvest and Feed the Children and the UJA Federation and B'nai B'rith did not make LuthorCorp's cut of approved charities, but Operation Blessing -- run by Pat Robertson, the same Pat Robertson who said that we got what we deserved on September 11, 2001 -- did.

Trying not to fiddle while Rome burns, but...(Part Deux):  Nevertheless, I am going to follow LuthorCorp's rules and throw my support behind AmeriCares, not because they are a secular organization, but because they are doing good works, not just in New Orleans but also in Darfur and Sudan and Bridgeport, Connecticut.  (Even if you have already thrown your support behind another charity, AmeriCare's website is still worth checking out.)  I will confess, though, that my motives are less than pure.  My original plan was to eschew the matching funds, select the charity of my choice, and then just give double what I had planned to give.  Then I read the press release from LuthorCorp, in which they announced that they would be donating $100,000 to the relief effort.  While it's $100,000 better than nothing, it still seemed to me to be a tiny amount of money to a multibillion-dollar, Fortune 500 company.  Then I read the second paragraph of the press release:  $50,000 is being donated now.  The balance of the $50,000 will take the form of matching contributions to employee donations.

Let me repeat that.  My multibillion-dollar, Fortune 500 employer is donating $50,000 now and $50,000 in October -- as long as their employees pony up $50,000 out of their own pockets.  If we don't donate, they won't either.  There are salespeople in some divisions of the company whose base salaries are more than $50,000.  LuthorCorp is, for all intents and purposes, donating a salary.

I'm giving.  I'm digging deep.  You'd better believe I'm going to make sure that my -- all together now! -- multibillion-dollar, Fortune 500 employer does not welsh on that other $50,000.  Ante up, LuthorCorp!

As told by Anderson Cooper on Bill Maher:  "[Survivors in New Orleans] are hearing politicians say 'We know you're frustrated.'  A man here came up to me and said 'We're not frustrated.  We're dead.'"

What the hell is going on in Astoria?, Part One:  Dear friends at NY1, it's not that I don't appreciate your Hurricane Katrina coverage.  What happened to Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama will have ineffable consequences on all of us for years to come, and it's important that we here in New York City know this.  Nevertheless, you are, first and foremost, a local news station, and while it's possible that someone out there feels a burning need to watch vox pops of motorists complaining about how much it costs to fill their gas tanks, some of us, particularly those of us who a) don't own a car and b) live in a certain part of northwestern Astoria have other questions, to wit:  What caused the four-alarm fire around the corner of my house, the fire that took out four businesses and sent 18 firefighters and a civilian to the hospital?  Why did I have to learn about this fire from a traffic-and-transit report, in which it was mentioned as an inconvenience to motorists ("Stay away from 31st Street and Ditmars Boulevard, due to Fire Department activity!"?  Was this really all you were able to learn?  Why was it aired on a very short cycle in the middle of the day?  Were the businesses adequately insured, and will they reopen?  (Since one of those businesses is McDonald's, I'm sure that that one is a big fat yes, but what about the little restaurant?  What about the optician's office?  What about the doughnut shop?)  Why were so many people on the scene overcome by smoke?  How long will it be before the block loses that stubborn smell of burnt tarpaper and putrefying seafood?  Can you understand that even though, in the great scheme of things, this fire doesn't draw a bead on the suffering of our New Orleanian brothers and sisters, some of us just might be curious to know what happened?  Why are we watching people complaining about the price of gas again?

What the hell is going on in Astoria?, Part Two:  Graffiti is nothing new in my neighborhood.  Sure, we have pretty little houses, but we also have apartment blocks, both large and small, and those blocks have flat roofs, all of which are a boon to graffiti taggers.  I have seen so much graffiti in my life that when I look out the subway window, it's just so much background clutter to me.  At least it was until this morning, when we passed a house on 31st Street covered in giant fierce letters:  YOU LIVE HERE, YOU DIE HERE, with an arrow pointing to one of the second floor windows.  It could just be smack talk, a battle of words between taggers.  But I have seen it twice now and it still makes my blood freeze, the way my blood froze when I was in college and the house down the road from my parents was sold to people who had company coming and going all hours of the day and night, and who had a van parked in the driveway, with crosshairs and SO MANY VICTIMS, SO LITTLE TIME painted on the side.

Is there such a thing as hot-weather comfort food?  Yes, yes, you can make an argument that much of the foofaraw surrounding obesity includes comfort food and comfort eating as a Very Bad Thing.  No, you should not find solace in your deepest emotional problems with food.  Nevertheless, sometimes you do want to eat something that is friendly and soulful, cheap to buy, easy to put together and slips down your throat with the greatest of ease.  It's not my own recipe; I found it in Rozanne Gold's Recipes 1-2-3.  I found it about ten years ago, and I've been making it every summer -- for it can only be made in the summer -- ever since.  Put a saucepan of water on to boil.  Cut into dice 6 ounces of ricotta salata or manouri cheese (you can use feta, but be sure to rinse it off, and be sure also to reduce the salt you add later, as feta is much saltier than ricotta salata) and 2 medium, 1 1/2 large or 1 giant ripe tomato.  Put the cheese and tomatoes into a bowl, add salt to taste, mix with your hands and let sit for about 1/2 hour.  Meanwhile, boil 8 ounces orzo (rice-shaped pasta) in salted water.  When the pasta is almost done, with the merest core of al dente hardness, pull it off the stove, drain it (do not rinse it!), pour it into the tomatoes and cheese, and stir until all is blended, but not so vigorously that you render the cheese into paste.  This will serve about 6-8 people, unless you find yourself picking at the bowl a lot.  You can eat it hot, at room temperature or cold.  I'm a fan of room temperature, myself.  It might not sound like much, but even after ten years, I still can't believe how good this tastes.

Closing with the punchline.  Last night, Bunni (to whom I would link except that TypePad just suddenly got cranky on me), Lloyd and I went to see The Brothers Grimm.  Without giving away any spoilers, I will say that everyone in the film (except for a hapless cat) gets what they deserve, and Jonathan Pryce, who plays an insane French general, gets exactly what he deserves.  At that moment, he mumbles, "All I wanted was a little order.  A piece of quiche would be nice."  The audience, which was small but enthusiastic, laughed loudly, but I'm sure I drowned them out with my own snorty laughter.  Bunni leaned over to me and whispered, "It's like you were in the room when they wrote it."  I love it when that happens.