Yolks. It’s the way I tell ’em.
I’ve been boiling eggs for nigh on forty-five years, but though my mother – an excellent, professionally-trained cook – knew her stuff and passed onto me various culinary techniques and skills, boiling eggs never seemed to be a sure-fire success. Her eggs were often too runny, so that we had to scoop the egg out into a cup, mushing the white (which was a wee bit too transparent for my taste) with the yolk, saving the whole enterprise by adding a knob of butter and dunking fat fingers of toast into the resulting soup. This, she called “American style”. As it was to be well over twenty years until I stepped on American soil, I had to take her word for it. I’ve been there many times since and I’ve never seen anyone eat a boiled egg that way, so I can only guess fashions have changed or she had a very good reason to pass off this culinary mess as a transatlantic foible.…