This week, I struggled with an egg.
Has it happened to you? You just boiled up a bunch of eggs and you are preparing to whip up a delicious and crowd-pleasing egg salad only to find the shell of each and every egg is so affixed to the white, that when you’re done you realize that you have thrown away nearly half of every egg with its shell.
I thought I had solved this problem with the ‘fool-proof’ method touted nearly everywhere: the ice bath. The method has many variations but the short version is: cook your eggs for however long you wish (9 minutes, 30 seconds is for me the sweet spot. Yolks are not runny but are slightly jammy. Increase time by 1 minute for each 350 meters of elevation above sea level, (I learned this hard way in Denver or should I say the runny way?), plunge your eggs into an ice bath, and cool completely before peeling.
But this week the ‘foolproof method’, like another well-known ova, had a great fall. Using the eggs from the same carton, in the same pot, for the same time, with the same ice bath as the previous week, the three I boiled all resisted shelling most stubbornly.
I went to that definitive source of information, the internet, and found a huge variety of conflicting advice. Use an ice bath, use room temperature water, start eggs in cold water, drop them into boiling water. Don’t boil but steam.
It was time to seek a higher authority.
I pulled from my bookshelf, On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. If Julia is the Moshe Rabenu of Cooking, Harold is the Judah ha-Nasi. His mishnah is an encyclopedia of the science of food and cooking. Want to know why almonds don’t taste like almond extract? Why beans cook faster with baking soda in the water? Curious about the physiological effects that a cup of coffee has on your body? Harold is your rav. This is one of the ten books I’ll take with me to the nursing home if not the grave
Chapter 2 of McGee’s 884-page tome is completely devoted to eggs. He addresses the sticky situation on page 88 under the subheading, Easily-Cracked and Not So Easily Peeled Shells. Sadly, his advice was not helpful. He suggests that the age of the eggs is the biggest determinant of how easy the eggs are to peel – the older the easier. However, I was using the same carton of eggs as the previous week and they had peeled just fine last time. The eggs were actually a week older. Reluctantly, I concluded that there may be no way to completely guarantee that a boiled egg is easy to peel. Like much of life there may be an inescapable element of chance when peeling eggshells.
But what I really wanted to write about this week was something written at the beginning of Chapter 2. It is on page 69 under the heading “The Chicken and the Egg.”
“…Victorian Samuel Butler awarded the egg overall priority when he said that a chicken is just an egg’s way of making another egg.”
In other words, a chicken is just a machine, a container, the egg is the actual point of the enterprise.
It reminded me of an idea I encountered not too long ago: the vast and beautiful diversity of life on this planet is just a system for carrying genetic material into the future. The diversity of species represents successful experiments (so far) of what has worked toward this end, and the numbers of individuals in any species are a kind of insurance against failure.
Consider the 17-year cicadas still, as of this writing, waiting quietly underground for the soil to hit a certain temperature as their signal to emerge in their explosive brood. They evolved to periodically burst forth in such vast numbers that the birds and other animals which find them tasty would simply not be able to eat them all before many of them were able to reproduce, sending their genes underground and another 17 years into the future.
Likewise, humans have been one of the most successful experiments of all, occupying every corner of the planet and in such numbers that we have pushed some of the other experiments into extinction. We’ve even evolved consciousness and a sense of meaning and purpose to better serve the genes. We’ve created art and science, all in service of sending our DNA forward into the future. There seems to exist the potential that a by-product of that success could be the failure of the entire life experiment. We must hope the eggs won’t allow the chickens to blow up the damn coop.
But what is the point of it all?
As with the chicken, maybe the egg is the point. We and all life serve as mere vessels for our genes which are engaged in a race to build a new container capable of taking them away from the earth before it can no longer sustain any living containers. That failure could occur either because one of the vessels (humans?) has made the platform unsuitable to sustain life (unlikely) or because the source of life’s energy, the sun, has run out of fuel (inevitable). The gene container could be a ship built by humans to carry us (and our DNA) across the galaxy or it could be some kind of spore able to travel safely through the cold vacuum of space, Invasion of the Body Snatchers style.
And although it strikes us as very important that humans be the container, we probably aren’t that important to the genes themselves. Chickens, after all, are fungible; the egg must go on.