So You Think You Can Cook? I Could Manage the Basics Or So I Thought!

But I'm getting way ahead of myself. First you must consider the source of the egg you are about to cook.

According to my research, the ideal choice is an egg from a healthy, happy chicken. But how do you assess a chicken's mood? It's not that she's about to strut around clucking Happy Days Are Here Again, or order a beer to cry into. I doubt if you could even tell if she's smiling or crying. I've heard of crocodile tears, but never chicken tears. I'm sure an investigation of several other Google sites would shed some light on how chickens express their inner feelings, but who has the time to explore them?

An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, Diego
Velázquez, 1618; Scottish National Gallery, part of Google Art Project

For the sake of brevity, let's assume you found an egg from an ecstatic chicken and cooked it in the correct pot, in the recommended amount of water for the optimal amount of time. Great! Now you can eat the perfect egg. Wrong. First you must peel it. Always tricky. Far too often, the shell crumbles into a million tiny pieces, to which parts of the white cling tenaciously — especially if you had selected a really fresh egg. I learned that an egg that is a week or two old is easier to peel because it gradually loses moisture through the pores in its shell and the air pocket at the tip expands.

In addition, according to Google, the low pH of the white gradually increases, making it adhere less strongly to the shell. Also, cracking the egg (gently!) just after boiling and then submerging it in ice water helps make it easier to peel. I bet you didn't know all that; and I'm sure you feel you could have lived the rest of your life without knowing that. But, then, you wouldn't know that you should buy eggs a week or two before you plan to boil them and let them age in the fridge. You must also consider that when you buy eggs at a store, rather than directly from the owner of the chicken who can tell you precisely when those eggs were laid, you have no way of knowing how long they have been sitting on the shelf, so your whole enterprise has been doomed from the start.

Stop! I'm overwhelmed! I don't know about you, but I don't think I'll boil another egg again as long as I live. It’s much too complicated!

Instead, I think I'll whip up some *boeuf bourguignon and croque monsieur. But I'm not sure how to make them.

I'd better Google them.

Editor's Note: For a Craig Claiborne Boeuf Bourguignon recipe from The New York Time Cook Book, 1961 edition, email us at SWWPUB at aol.com; it's delicious. Introduced to us by my mother-in-law, Fredricka Ryland Gray.

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