Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring,
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter — and the Bird is on the Wing.
— "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" by Edward Fitzgerald
The first heady days of spring — when the birds flutter, the flowers bloom, and the sun shines — urge us to fling off whatever stingy, wintry, bah-humbug-ish tendencies we may have and embrace life anew. And what better symbol of new life than the egg, literal bearer of life.
My motto in all things gustatory is "Be moderate, be sensible, but have a good time." And so I’m happy to see a resurgence of interest in real food, including eggs. The heartless heart police took us away from nature’s perfect food, an ancient symbol of wholeness, and manufactured Egg Beaters, Egg Mates, Better‘N Eggs, and all the other sorry excuses for eggs. Far better for your quality of life would be to find truly good eggs and eat them in moderation.
There is no question about what constitutes a truly good egg. It is laid by a mentally and physically healthy hen. This translates to a free-running chicken who eats organic feed and insects and plants, and who is not confined to a factory henhouse (hellhouse) in which debeaked, salmonella-ridden fowl are kept laying round the clock until they give out and are made into cat food.
The hen’s quality of life, her physical and mental well-being, is of the utmost importance when it comes to the quality of the egg. The happy hen produces an egg with a viscous white and a high, plump yolk. Unlike the pale, watery yolks we are used to in supermarket eggs, these yolks are brilliant orange, even red (egg yolk is rossi, "red" in Italian).
If you crack a regular store egg next to a free range organic egg, you will see that they are not created equal. Or, to be more precise, they were created equal, but since man has muddled things so badly they are no longer equal. Those poor hens in factory egg-production facilities, whose feet never touch the ground and who never nibble at fresh weeds, grass, or insects produce eggs that are watery in color and taste, and guess what? They are also low in nutrients, particularly in the omega-3 fatty acids that are so important to health.
A free range hen, on the other hand, who pecks and scratches and eats a huge variety of nutritious insects and plants, gives us eggs high in omega-3s. Since this was reported last year, some commercial egg producers have been adding algae to their chicken feed to boost the omega-3s. This may help out on the omega-3 front, but not on the larger problem, which is treating hens as if they were inanimate machines, not living beings. And what you get out of a hen treated like a machine is like some mechanical shadow of the real thing. What you get out of a hen treated like a hen is an egg that tastes like an egg — rich, nutty, buttery. Once you have eaten an egg like this, you will never turn back. You can get them at your local farmers’ market or health food store. Or go to your supermarket and nag until the manager comes up with a source of free-range, organic eggs.
Now that you have your fine fresh egg, what to do with it? I defer to two very different writers who both know that with a good egg, as with most good things in life, you should mostly stay out of its way.
Vladimir Nabokov
I stumbled across this recipe in the New York Public Library’s collection of Nabokov manuscripts. Hidden among his drafts of Lolita and Laughter in the Dark (written on index cards and kept in shoe boxes); his letters to other writers (a response to a query from E. B. White about the natural history of spiders); and his querulous notes to himself ("Things I Hate"), was a single sheet, handwritten in pencil, with this recipe.
The recipe title is a play on words. In the Paris markets, which Nabokov frequented after leaving Russia and before settling in the United States, the egg seller will not sell you eggs until he or she knows what you are going to do with them and when. It’s not just nosiness; it’s information the seller needs in order to know which eggs to sell you. Two-week-old ones are for baking, week-old ones for omelettes, and the very freshest eggs are for oeuf a la coque (soft boiled eggs), which Nabokov renamed Eggs à la Nabocoque.
Eggs à la Nabocoque
Boil water in a saucepan (bubbles mean it is boiling!). Take two eggs (for one person) out of the refrigerator. Hold them under the hot tap water to make them ready for what awaits them.
"Place each in a pan, one after the other, and let them slip soundlessly into the (boiling) water. Consult your wristwatch. Stand over them with a spoon preventing them (they are apt to roll) from knocking against the damned side of the pan.
If, however, an egg cracks in the water (now bubbling like mad) and starts to disgorge a cloud of white stuff like a medium in an oldfashioned seance, fish it out and throw it away. Take another and be more careful.
After 200 seconds have passed, or, say, 240 (taking interruptions into account), start scooping the eggs out. Place them, round end up, in two egg cups. With a small spoon tap-tap in a circle and hen pry open the lid of the shell. Have some salt and buttered bread (white) ready. Eat.
V.N.
November 18, 1972
[A notation in ink was made at the top:]
"Maxime de la Falaise McKendry
for a cooking book"
[And a later notation under it:]
"Never acknowledged by Maxime"
The next recipe comes from the writer Laurie Colwin, who was also undoubtedly dealing with very fresh eggs. The recipe is included in her collection of short essays, More Home Cooking.
"In my opinion, the perfect form of egg is sunny side up, very gently cooked and covered until a pink, filmy veil forms over the yolk. These eggs should be served with very lightly buttered toast.... Both eggs and toast get the merest sprinkle of salt and nothing else. You do not eat these for breakfast: You eat them for dinner when you are fully awake."
Man Does Not Live by Eggs Alone
But we do not live by eggs alone, and spring is the time to combine them with the first greens of the season. Susan Loomis, author of The Italian Farmhouse Cookbook (Workman, 2000), says that when she asked the owner of La Subida restaurant for a recipe he felt was most typical of the farms in his region of Friuli, he recommended the frittata con erbe, a typical Easter season dish that has more vegetables than eggs because wild greens are plentiful in spring while eggs, always precious, are even more precious during winter and early spring when the hens lay fewer. His instructions for making the frittata went like this: "Find yourself an Italian-Slovenian grandmother and go with her into the fields. Follow her and pick everything that she picks. When she is finished, go home, cook the greens of the field, and mix them with eggs for this frittata."
Loomis translated this recipe into one using fennel and leeks, but I have readapted it to be somewhat more faithful to the Italian-Slovenian grandmothers. You should feel free to substitute any green or greens, from spinach to arugula to lamb’s quarters. If you are harvesting your own wild greens such as dandelion, lamb’s quarters, or nettles, be sure that you do so from areas that have not been treated with chemicals.
Deep Green Frittata
3 Tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, sliced paper thin
2 large leeks, rinsed and diced
6 ounces Swiss chard (or dandelion greens), chopped coarse
8 ounces fresh spinach (or stinging nettles), chopped coarse
4 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 fresh mint leaves
1. Heat two tablespoons of the oil in a large heavy skillet over medium heat until it is hot but not smoking. Add the onions. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions are softened slightly, about five minutes. Add the chard and stir to combine. Cover and cook until the chard has softened and wilted into the onion mixture, about eight minutes. Add the spinach. Stir and cook, covered, another ten minutes.
2. Preheat the broiler. Whisk the eggs with the salt in a medium bowl just until they are broken up. Stack the mint leaves and then slice them crosswise into very fine strips. Whisk immediately into the eggs. Stir the cooked vegetables into the eggs.
3. Heat the remaining one tablespoon of oil in a nine-inch skillet over medium-high heat until it is fairly hot but not smoking. Add the egg mixture. Flatten it out in the pan, and cook without stirring until the eggs are set but still liquid on top, about five minutes.
4. Place the pan about five inches from the broiler heat source and cook just until the top is set, about four minutes. Be very careful not to overcook the frittata; it should still be very tender in the center.
5. Flip the frittata out onto a warmed serving platter, cut into wedges and serve immediately.
Terra Brockman is the director of The Land Connection Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving farmland and promoting small-scale, diversified, organic agriculture in Illinois. Visit www.thelandconnection.org or call 309-965-2407 to learn how to get involved.