On Food and Cooking

The egg is one of the kitchen’s marvels, and
one of nature’s. Its simple, placid shape
houses an everyday miracle: the
transformation of a bland bag of nutrients into
a living, breathing, vigorous creature. The egg
has loomed large as a symbol for the
enigmatic origins of animals, of humans, of
gods, of the earth, of the entire cosmos. The
Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Indian Rg
Veda, Greek Orphic mysteries, and creation
myths throughout the world have been
inspired by the eruption of life from within a
lifeless, blank shell.
Humpty Dumpty has had a great fall! If
eggs inspire any notable feeling today, it’s
boredom tinged by wariness. The chicken egg
is now an industrial product, so familiar that it
would be almost invisible — except that it
was stigmatized by the cholesterol phobia of
the 1970s and 1980s.
Neither familiarity nor fear should obscure
eggs’ great versatility. Their contents are