Eggs and toast, not eggs on toast

and new ways of being, an essay

I feel transformed when I make myself a meal of eggs and toast. In England, where I grew up, fried eggs on toast are a common choice for breakfast or lunch, often made with butter in a frying pan and served on top of toasted slices of bread and butter with perhaps marmite or maybe even with ketchup or brown sauce. Eggs cooked this way on toast are unappealing to me because when you put the eggs on top of the toast, the egg white to egg yolk you get on each bite is more white than yolk. Enjoying this meal also depends greatly on the freshness and type of bread you use. Soft sandwich bread is texturally better, but it is not nutritionally better, making all of this a complex choice. But this complexity does not stop me from making eggs for meals because eggs and bread are always available at home.

There are ways to improve this dish, of course. As a teenager, I would add the marmite to the whites of the eggs as they were cooking in the frying pan. When you do this, the marmite hardens on the edges of the egg whites and becomes sticky and very salty, making it more interesting to eat than boring egg whites. I would feed this dish to my baby sister as she grew up, who would request marmite eggs.

Then you have eggs and soldiers, eggs boiled soft and served in an egg cup with the shell on and sliced off at the top to make room for dipping tiny rectangular pieces of toast that have been buttered and possibly marmited. This meal of eggs and bread means that the eater can experience high ratios of yolk to bread in the first few egg dips. But boiling eggs is not as simple as it sounds. You can easily overcook, undercook, or even crack the eggs from cooking at too high a heat. You must also perfect the size of your toast pieces so they dip easily into the egg. The cooking time depends on the size of your egg and the temperature, and the egg's freshness will alter the result. You must also have egg cups in your kitchen to stand the eggs in for dipping, and, as I have learnt recently from an Instagram chef, the eggs are better served in the cup the wrong way around, as the yolk will be more at the top. Should you be away from home travelling, you will unlikely find egg cups in your kitchen to utilise, should these be your preferred method of eating eggs as this method of cooking and eating eggs is not culturally universal.

"The point of a soft-boiled egg is the difficulty of eating it, the attention it requires, the ceremony.".

— Ursula K. Le Guin

While living in Spain, I learned a new way of eating eggs and bread. Huevos fritos (fried eggs) are, indeed, of the fried kind, fried in vast quantities of extra virgin olive oil until the edges of the eggs go crispy. When I first ate this meal with a Spanish family I lived with, I watched my Spanish Dad ripping tiny pieces of crusty baguette with his hands and dipping it into the egg yolks as he went. There is a verb in Spanish for this ritualistic act of dipping or wetting bread. It is to mojar. Amazed by this act, I proceeded a mojar my bread into the egg yolk forever, never to put eggs on top of toast again.

My eggs and soldier-making skills have truly started to take shape as I have matured. But whenever I am not in the mood to take a chance on making eggs and soldiers for whatever reason, such as, god forbid, the eggs were in the fridge, I turn to the Spanish method, which never fails me. I feel transformed whenever I look at a plate of eggs and bread I make using this method, which I can never unlearn and has left me mojando (wetting) just about anything one can wet with bread. Whenever I mojar my eggs, I am excited to think about where I have yet to go in this world and what acts I will learn to do there next.

My mum’s eggs on toast

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With love from that bloody foody, that is, Lana x