My eggs-entricity

I made scrambled eggs on toast for my brunch today. There’s nothing even remotely unusual about that, of course, because I have eggs once or twice most weeks. However, there IS one thing that is a bit unusual, and it’s all about the yolks.

I have eggs several different ways: Poached, fried, scrambled, boiled (soft boiled in Americanese), and hard boiled, as well as using them as an ingredient in various dishes. However, there are times when even the idea of runny yolks repulses me, so on those days poached and fried are out of the question. I should mention here that today’s scrambled eggs were not an example of this: I was just in the mood for scrambled eggs.

This has pretty much been a lifelong thing. For example, back in 1973, when I was 15, my parents took me to the United Kingdom with them. My dad was attending a church-related summer programme in Canterbury, and staying on campus, so my mother and I stayed at a B&B. The host usually served a “full English” breakfast (eggs, toast, bacon, perhaps a sausage, along tea, coffee, or juice. While she sometimes mixed it up a bit, eggs were usually part of it.

The host noticed that I cut the whites away from the yolks, and ate only the whites. Sometimes my mother would have the yolks, but she didn’t usually. My mother told me she could practically see the “wheels turning in her head”, and the host eventually started serving me scrambled eggs (we never asked her to, and I never complained—I don’t think I ever actually spoke to her, actually—my mother spoke for us). I ate all of the scrambled eggs. Unfortunately for me, the host didn’t work out the solution until near the very end of our stay.

The thing about that time (or earlier, for that matter) is that I don’t remember actively disliking, much less avoiding, runny yolks, and the only reason the B&B story is because my mother noticed and talked about it for years afterward. At some point I obviously started eating runny yolks, but I have no idea when that was or why, however, I think that maybe it was because my friends and I would go out for breakfast after we went to the bars, and I wouldn’t have wanted to seem weird by avoiding yolks. I don’t know that for sure, of course, but it’s pretty much the way I would’ve thought in those days, a decade after I avoided yolks at a B&B in Canterbury.

However, there are still some days when the very idea of runny yolks really does repulse me, and on those days scrambled eggs are the only eggs I’ll make. Yes, even I think that’s odd, but it’s also just a part of who I am, so I’m certainly not embarrassed about it (clearly…). But there’s one more odd thing about this: I often think about it when I’m about to cooks some eggs—but only on the days I don’t care about runny yolks (on those days, all options are open). Yeah, it’s weird. And I don’t really care about that.