Tuesday, September 18, 2007

THE INCREDIBLE, (IN)EDIBLE EGG

I’m not what you might call a voracious egg eater.

I devour plenty of eggs as ingredients in various dishes - cakes, soufflée, custards, et cetera, but I have never been of the school that considers breakfast incomplete without a couple of eggs.

Having said this, I do enjoy the occasional fried egg, a perfect companion to a plate of corned beef hash. My preference is for the once-over-hard-with-broken-yolk style (once-over-lightly if with hash), but I can do scrambled eggs or omelettes without a problem. I make a mean omelette aux fines herbes, and I have extremely fond childhood memories of my grandmother’s scrambled eggs, which incorporated onions that were fried in butter until they were golden brown.

Lox and eggs? Delightful. Salami and eggs? Ambrosia. Pastrami and eggs? Heavenly.

On the other side of the Elisson Egg-Preference Spectrum you’ll find Egg Salad. I’ll eat hard boiled eggs any old time, but egg salad gives me the willies.

SWMBO, meanwhile, avoids eggs qua eggs like the Black Death. They’re on her “Do Not Eat” list in big boldface sans-serif type, unless they’ve been buried in the dish so as to be unrecognizable. Surprisingly, she has developed a taste for egg-white omelettes, but only if there is absolutely no trace of yolk.

So far, I’ve been talking about Chicken Eggs. There are plenty of other eggs, of course, although my experience has been limited to chicken eggs and the occasional quail egg (enjoyed raw with a serving of ikura-nigirizushi.

Ikura: now, there’s yet another type of egg. Fish eggs. Caviar. I love it. Salmon eggs are one of my faves, as long as they’re absolutely fresh. Sturgeon caviar ain’t too shabby, either.

But an eggy post by David Bogner over at Treppenwitz today reminded me that there are some paths in Egg-Land where I plan never to tread.

Oh, I’ve had the Hundred-Year Eggs, AKA Century Eggs, to which he refers in the front end of his post. They’re not bad, as long as you try not to think of them as eggs, but rather as some Exotic Weird Cheese...to which they bear more than a passing resemblance.

But then there is the infamous Balut.

In his book Holidays in Hell, P. J. O’Rourke encounters the Balut, which is nothing less than a duck embryo boiled in the shell and eaten whole: fetal bones, beak, feathers and all.
“[It] looks like an anti-abortion movie produced by the Duckburg branch of the Right-To-Life organization.”
Fear Factor dining at its finest, the Balut is, according to Wikipedia, best enjoyed with beer.

I’ll say. Namely, the kind of Copious Quantities of beer that will render you insensible and completely unaware of what you are eating.

As for me? NFW, my friends. NFW.

Not even Velociman would put his face into one of those.

The image below the fold is not for the Easily Disgusted. Don’t say I didn’t warn you...

...and if you’re reading this with an RSS aggregator, whoopsie!

Balut!
Balut. Image courtesy of Eddie Lin of Deep End Dining.

Pass the salt, eh?

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