One Year, Over Easy
If I had to characterize this year it would be the year of the egg. I’m afraid to admit that I’ve spent most of my culinary life in fear of the egg. Perhaps my very first professional run in with one was when I took a job as the brunch cook at Teddy’s. You all know Teddy’s right? It was one of the first spots in Williamsburg. Hard to imagine a time when Teddy’s didn’t have a packed brunch but there was one, about 16 1/2 years ago. I lived above Teddy’s. My roommate Anita was the bartender. I spent a lot of time there and it seemed only natural that the owners would ask a girl fresh out of macrobiotic cooking school to take a spin at cooking brunch. Short order egg cookery. I remember making and remaking broken hollandaise sauce. I remember corned beef hash out of a can and home cooked potatoes and I remember my first over easy egg. I had no idea how to execute it. Two eggs in a pan and I didn’t know how to get them over. I froze. I also don’t know how she knew to turn up at that very moment but there she was, my roommate and savior. She grabbed the pan out of my hand, scooched the eggs down toward the front and flipped them over, smiled and returned the pan to me. I probably worked two weekends at Teddy’s but I still don’t know how I made it through. I think it took them another little while to figure out how to get brunch up and running, but succeed they did, despite my early attempts to bring the house down. My second terrifying egg memory is poaching at Savoy. I mostly worked a night schedule but Dave Wurth, the Chef de Cuisine, liked me and as an honor, or because I was lowest in the pecking order, I was made to work one lunch shift a week with him. Dave was a completely lovely and helpful teacher in the kitchen. He never raised his voice, was entirely patient and hilarious to boot. But he had a service to run and he liked a poached egg on the lunch menu. I can’t blame him.. but I couldn’t poach an egg. Every service I was handed a different thought on the subject or a new technique to try, but when the orders started coming in he invariably had to take over my duty as I choked every single time. I still can’t poach an egg. I can get it in the pot and I can tell when it’s done but I can’t get the whites to stay in line. They always stray all over the pot. I’ve poached 50 at a time and still can’t master the technique. Then there was brunch at Diner. I still don’t know I managed to hide my most humiliating secret over the years of brunch service and menu planning. First off, I only worked the shift if someone who was scheduled to do so didn’t show up. Then, I allowed that poached eggs did not need to be served and it would be up to the discretion of the cook to decide whether they would honor the request or not. We didn’t do how would you like your eggs style service, rather we paired the egg technique with the dish, but people would always ask. And while I was most terrified of poached eggs I was truly afraid of all egg cookery. It’s not that I couldn’t cook an egg, it’s that I can’t cook 250 orders of them in 5 hours. I created all sorts of defenses around hating brunch. It seemed so uncivilized, too busy to even make nice food, all of the least experienced cooks and servers are made to work it. Brunch is absurd and when it comes down to it you could just make an egg at home. Who would want to spend precious hours on their day off waiting for a table just to eat a meal in 10 minutes? I made exclamations and proclamations and hid behind the indisputable fact that my talents were better put to use at dinner time. There was one exception though, the lovable, masterable, quantifiable hard boiled egg. So finally, I have had a year at Saltie of enjoying and semi-mastering egg cookery. I think there are multiple reasons for this. The first and most important is probably that I don’t have to cook that many, even on a busy day. So each egg gets its time and the attention it requires. The second is that I have learned. I have learned, thank you Rebecca, that you can just stick an egg in the oven and 3 or 5 or so minutes later it will be perfectly sunny side up. I have also learned how to make nice sunny side up eggs in the pan. I like to shimmy the egg into the curve of the pan and tip it up so the egg kind of coddles in the butter or olive oil. I like to baste the whites. I like to scramble the egg, thanks again Rebecca, by letting the whites almost completely set up and then folding the yolk in. I love it when the scrambled egg runs out just a little onto the plate, so I know it’s perfectly soft. I like putting my attention on cooking the egg, I find it engaging. And I like to serve eggs with everything. Everything that I like to eat I like to eat better with an egg on it. Salad, grains, beans, toast, eggs. -CF eggs by Katy Porte
