When I was 13 years old, a kitchen apprentice in Bourg-en-Bresse, France, I was put in charge of a dozen hens. It was my job to fatten them on vegetable peels and leftover soup. It was theirs to peck about the courtyard and lay eggs.
By the time I was thirteen-and-a-quarter, I had learned that the hen sitting on her eggs deserved respect. While on the hunt for eggs, I was terrorized a number of times by a charging, puffed-up hen for getting too close to her nest. Her yield came at a cost.
It is unpretentious but challenging. Low-calorie but lush. No food is as democratic as the egg, and the ham and eggs of the corner diner can be as superb as the caviar omelet of Michelin’s most touted triple-starred restaurant. Eggs are the truly universal food of the world. (Sorry, pizza.
Thankfully, my teenage henhouse scuffles did nothing to snuff out my childhood love for eggs. Once I moved to Paris, I worked as a young chef in many restaurants. Each time I applied for a job, the head chef invariably challenged me to make a perfect French omelet. As inexpensive an evaluation as it was accurate, it was the test of culinary knowledge.
So each time I crack an egg, memories pour out along with the yolk and white. I remember from one of my shows with Julia Child (a fellow egg lover), we cooked an ostrich egg whose shell required an electric drill to break — for a wonderful omelet with mushrooms and chives, enough to feed six to eight. Or the fillets of trout plucked from a creek in the Catskills by my wife, Gloria, flanked by freshly scrambled eggs from a nearby farm, and saturated with butter, flavored with tarragon and served with brioche and white wine — a great breakfast. Or the days alone, too, hungry and perhaps a bit grouchy, salvaged in just 2½ minutes on low heat that ended with a fat, bright, orange yolk running over ham.
Until then, if you don’t like my defense of eggs, go ahead: Throw some my way!