Press Release
Heaven on oeuf
Sunday 4th June 2006
His love-hate relationship with eggs dates back to childhood. But with cheese pudding and rhubarb snow on the menu, Nigel Slater gets cracking. Photographs Jonathon Lovekin. I am both repelled and fascinated by eggs. On one hand there is the slithering texture, the sulphurous smell, the fact that I was force-fed them as a child.On the other hand, their quiet, oval beauty, intense fragility and the calming, pastel colours of their shells. To take one from its dimpled cardboard box and cradle it tenderly in the palm of your hand is to experience one of the unsung pleasures of cooking.
I love watching the pure, watery whites change to airy, bubble-speckled froth as I whisk. Perhaps my subliminal chant of ‘I hate you, I hate you’ as I beat the whites into fluffy clouds is why I have such success with meringues, soufflés and cakes. Maybe they now who is boss. There is a gentle satisfaction in slowly folding the shaking, snow-white peaks into the tarragon-flecked base of a cheese soufflé, or experiencing the slight frisson as you add sugar for a meringue, knowing, as you do, the capriciousness of such a mixture. Will it work this time?
How could any cook fail to be charmed by Cedric Morris’s painting The Eggs that adorns Elizabeth David’s book An Omelette and a glass of wine? Those dozens oeuf’s in a brown dish on a lavender table, begging to be stroked, or perhaps being beaten with olive oil into Mrs David’s ‘golden ointment’ have a certain timeless quality. Seemingly as fresh today as when they were painted.
It is rare that there are no eggs in this house – like lemons, salt or rice – though most will never see boiling water. They are generally from small farms and are without exception from free-range flocks. A current favourite are the exquisite turquoise, green and olive eggs from Clarence Court’s Old Cotswold Legbar hens. I buy them for saffron-yellow aioli in which to dunk, hot thick chips; for pavlova the size of a hat-box dripping with raspberries; for flourless, idiot proof soufflés of British cheese and thyme and for endless bowels of summer mayonnaise. I may not like them fried, poached or boiled, but it doesn’t mean I could cope without them.
A lot of people ask me if eggs should be kept in the fridge. The modern answer is yes, but only because contemporary living has robbed us of the cool, dry larders that suited their storage better than the chilled humidity of a fridge. Freshness should be everything but it isn’t. I always find a slightly older egg white will whip better than a new laid one, giving a firmer meringue and isles inclined to weep in the oven, but there are to many perils lurking for me to encourage anyone to use eggs that aren’t spanking fresh.
While the shinning egg yolk and its depth of colour is what interest most people (the white is considered just packaging by some), it is the rest of the egg that gets used even more in my kitchen. The shells make their way to the compost bin our get crushed and put round the runner beans in the garden in a vain attempt to stop the march of the snails, and the egg white itself ends up in snowy peaks of apple and rhubarb snow, or made into hazelnut meringues for sandwiching with cream and blackberries. Add to that the occasional addition of beaten whites to lighten a sorbet or a lemon roulade and it is possible to see why the white rather than the yolk gets my vote. But then, who could possibly not dive into a bowl of deepest crocus-yellow mayonnaise set out on the table on a blazing summers day?
Enough to tempt even the most ardent egg-hater to break the habit of a lifetime.