Love Bites: Marital Skirmishes in the Kitchen. Christopher Hirst
both verbal and actual, were quickly extinguished. Mostly, it was a rewarding, or at least filling, adventure. Some couples climb Kilimanjaro: we made a pork pie.
Battle of the boil
HAVING MOVED MY TOOTHBRUSH into Mrs H’s house, I found myself eating very well, though a surprising deficiency in her abilities emerged early in the day. After I’d cooked the breakfast egg for perhaps a dozen times on the trot, it occurred to me that Mrs H didn’t do boiled eggs.
‘Of course I can boil an egg,’ she insisted.
‘But have you ever done a soft-boiled egg?’
Her resistance crumpled like a toast soldier encountering a ten-minute egg.
‘Well, rarely.’
‘When did you last do one?’
‘Can’t remember. My father was always in charge of egg boiling. I followed my mother’s example.’
‘You mean you both just sat there and waited for them to arrive?’
‘Yes. Like chicks in a nest with our beaks open.’
‘Just like you do with me?’
‘Yes.’
Of course, it was no great hardship to plug this unexpected gap in Mrs H’s culinary repertoire. It gave me a raison d’être of sorts. But her lack of enthusiasm for this little dish was mystifying. In my view, the breakfast egg is 0-shaped bliss. I formed this opinion at an early age. While other boys invested their spending money on footballs or Ian Allan train-spotting books, I bought a humorous egg-cup etched with the injunction, ‘Get cracking!’
Mrs H’s take-it-or-leave-it approach to the soft-boiled egg did not prevent her pointing out my occasional failures with some vigour. I concede that it is not a good start to the day when you crack open your egg and find a yolk surrounded by a mainly liquid white. Still, I generally press on and eat the sad swirl. Not so Mrs H. ‘I think that’s the worst egg you’ve ever done for me,’ she said once, pushing away her untouched breakfast. She was so disturbed that it was several days before she could contemplate another boiled egg.
In order to improve my technique, I began to explore the unexpectedly vexed business of boiling eggs. Though the war between the Big Endians and the Little Endians about the best way to tackle an egg was a Swiftian satire, this stalwart of the breakfast table sparked a vigorous conflict in 1998. The cause of combustion was Delia Smith’s advice in her BBC programme How to Cook. Her method involves making a pinprick in the big end to prevent cracking, then simmering for ‘exactly one minute’. You then remove the pan from the heat and leave the egg in the water, resetting the timer for five or six minutes, depending on whether you want a white that is ‘wobbly’ or ‘completely set’. This advice was described as ‘insulting’ by fellow telly chef Gary Rhodes. ‘I really don’t believe the majority of people cannot boil an egg,’ he huffed. Obviously, he hadn’t met Mrs H.
In 2005, there was a further kerfuffle when Loyd Grossman tested the boiled egg techniques of five chefs for Waitrose Food Illustrated. Giorgio Locatelli’s method involved constantly stirring the egg in boiling water for six minutes. The resulting centrifuge, he claimed, should keep the yolk exactly in the middle of the boiled egg. Antonio Carluccio insisted that the egg should be boiled for three minutes and then left to stand in the water for thirty seconds. But it was the procedure advocated by Michel Roux of the Waterside Inn at Bray that caused feathers to fly. In his book Eggs, he recommends that an egg should be placed in a small pan, covered generously with cold water and set over a medium heat. ‘As soon as the water comes to the boil, count up to sixty seconds for a medium egg,’ Roux explained to me. ‘It requires neither a watch nor an egg timer and it is infallible.’ Grossman reported disaster when he attempted this method: ‘It was so close to raw that I didn’t want to eat it.’ I met Roux a few months after this criticism and he was still incandescent about Grossman’s comments.
In order to achieve an impartial view, I tried the Roux method using an egg at room temperature. The result was a lightly boiled egg. To achieve a medium set, I had to count for another thirty seconds. Obviously, the time varies depending on the temperature of the egg before it goes into the water and the size of the egg. My main objection to the method is that counting up to sixty or, worse still, ninety is excessively demanding for some of us at breakfast time.
I attempted several methods that claimed to produce the perfect boiled egg, though I drew the line at St Delia’s suggestion of simmering for the time it takes to sing three verses of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. Eventually, I evolved a technique that eschews any form of timer, whether human or mechanical. It involves putting two eggs into simmering water, looking at the digital clock on the oven and adding another four minutes to whatever time is displayed. When this period clicks up, I add a few more seconds for luck, making (I hope) four and a half minutes in all. I then whip out the egg. It works, more or less. The result is usually a nicely set white and liquid but slightly thickened yolk. Mrs H’s customary response is ‘Very nice’. This is satisfactory, though on her scale of responses it is not as ecstatic as her top accolade, ‘Yum’.
Occasionally, for inexplicable reasons, this method produces an underdone egg and accompanying complaints from Mrs H, but I still prefer human approximation to mechanical certainty. ‘An egg is always an adventure,’ said Oscar Wilde. ‘The next one may be different.’ In that spirit, I stick to guesswork even if it means a variable outcome at the breakfast table. That’s me, living for kicks.
If Mrs H wanted a certain outcome in her boiled egg, she could, of course, break the habit of a lifetime and start doing them herself. Instead, she continues sitting there with beak open. Had she ever considered attempting the breakfast simmer in our two decades together?
‘Nope. See what you can get away with if you keep quiet.’
The scramble for success
The boot was on the other foot when it came to scrambled eggs. My inadequacy was brought home when I made some for Mrs H. ‘This is fine,’ she said, ‘as long as you like scrambled eggs that are pale, hard and rubbery.’ I scrutinised my effort, which leaked a watery residue that made the under-lying toast go soggy.
‘It’s not all that bad,’ I protested, risking a nibble.
‘Hmm,’ considered Mrs H. ‘Perhaps I’ve had worse scrambled eggs in hotels.’ Recalling my encounters with terrible hotel scrambles – friable, evil-smelling, desiccated – I realised that this was not saying very much.
‘Chuck it in the bin and buy some more eggs,’ said Mrs H.
Swallowing my pride, which was easier than my eggs, I reassessed my scrambling technique. At some point in the past, I’d conceived the idea that speed was of the essence with scrambled eggs. Plenty of heat and plenty of spoon-whirling guaranteed success. Occasionally, I would examine the chewy results of my speed-scramble and ponder, ‘This can’t be right.’
Mrs H put me right: ‘You need four eggs, plenty of butter and plenty of patience.’ Of all the culinary lessons imparted by Mrs H in this book, the one that has taken root most effectively, at least in her opinion, is how to do scrambled eggs. ‘You’ve learned to do them very well,’ she said, rather like an old master dispatching a talented apprentice into the wide world. ‘I like your scrambled eggs as much as mine.’ Since then, scrambled eggs have become my default snack. Nothing as simple to cook tastes quite so good.
For two people, five lightly beaten and seasoned eggs are added to a pan that is just warm enough to melt a walnut-sized lump of butter. Cooking at low heat is of the essence. Unlike boiled eggs, poached eggs and soufflés, scrambled eggs demand the near-constant involvement of the cook. They should also be consumed immediately. (That’s why the hotel breakfast scramble is usually hopeless.) Nothing seems to happen for ages while you keep stirring. Then,