A raw egg that falls, splatters. A boiled egg that falls merely cracks.
My local supermarket recently began stocking dark yolk eggs. What is a yolk? A packet of life, a sack of lipids, a jest, a joke. Egg white surrounds it to nourish the growing chick. I could use a care package like that, I thought. I bought a dozen.
When I got home I opened the carton and saw all of them were cracked. Every single one. I went back to the store, and this time I made sure to check them for wounds before I poached them from their little refrigerated heaven.
Back at home, I watched the pot of water as it boiled. Maybe this time it would not burst into an ecstasy of phase change. And again, my witness of it did nothing to stop it. I stood over the warmth of the stove, the steam. All the heat in the house ends up upstairs in the bedrooms, nestling around my dear sleeping children and Mr. Bagel’s empty bed, warming it in anticipation of his return from his night shift; in the kitchen, on these cold winter mornings, I must hover my hands over the heat radiating from my tools. When the water reached its inevitable hard bubble, I dropped in six eggs, one by one.
They plunked softly against the stainless steel bottom. My fingertips got too close to the surface of disaster and were scalded by the backsplash. I gritted my teeth. I let the eggs slip in as gently as I could, like children into a deep, still sleep. The eggs swayed in the explosion of vapor from the bottom of the pot.
I tried to think of a task to occupy myself while the eggs perversely incubated for six minutes. (I was after the perfect gooey yolk.) I prepared an ice bath for the eggs. I stood over the bowl, fingers lingering in the freezing water to soothe their pained tips. They began to burn again just the same. Everything seems to add another crack to my too-fragile shell. I watched my body heat make currents in the water as it attempted to find equilibrium.
I was the lonely egg in the ice bath, I realized. I was the egg coward who could not stand to boil, but yet could not remain in the fridge. I was the flawed egg who’d cracked before even leaving the store. My thoughts were scrambled.
I wished I could look on the sunny side up side of things and whip up my thoughts into a fluffy meringue, but all I could think about was a raw egg floating in a dead pool of ice water. Still an egg in name, but separated from its shell, lesser than it was. An egg that could not bear the pain that was needed to transform into something more. An egg broken from the start.
The last ice cube melted, and I realized it’d been much, much longer than six minutes since I’d begun. I used a pair of tongs to whisk the overheated things out of the water and drop them in the bath. After they’d sat for six minutes, I pulled one out, cracked it against the counter, and peeled it. Its thin membrane stuck to the white and I was left with a plate of shards and useless meat. Still I dug, until I uncovered the yolk: hard as a rock. Green. Not gooey. Disgusting.
Anyway, here’s the recipe:
- Boil water.
- Put in eggs for as long as you can stand.
- Evacuate to ice bath. Attempt to enjoy.
