Egg-zackly!

I like eggs. Or do I like eggs? The jury is still out on them. Why? Very simply because I am not sure that eggs like me. It could be like the old avocado story – I love avocado, I would scarf down every one I ever met, but for one small problem: avocados do not like me. They go into my avid tummy and cause it to do an almost instant and astonishingly painful reject, depriving me not only of my will to continue to live, but also of any avocado I may have ingested in the bargain. Eggs do that, too, but not as severely and, puzzlingly, not as often. I am still trying to work that one out.

I don’t remember if I ate eggs when I was very young. Perhaps my fond parents, grandmother and ayah fed them to me, along with other infant delights such as mashed banana and Farex, on which I was brought up for many moons. But the first real memory I have of eating eggs is sitting perched on the kitchen counter just before a dinner party and watching my mother make devilled eggs. She boiled the lot, split them, neatly scooped out the yolks and then mixed them up with mustard, salt and pepper and then refilled the egg-hollows with a piping tube. Seeing me look longingly at the whole process, she handed things over to me and went to check on the table setting. And came back to find me licking the mixing fork, very little devilling in the whites and a blissfully happy smile on my eggy face.

A few years later I was shown how to make French toast. It was a gloriously messy process, from beating the eggs to soaking the bread, and I loved doing it. Until I ate French toast in an American pancake restaurant, that is, where even the egginess of the fried bread was drowned in the sickly sweetness of the maple syrup that bathed it. So I came up with my own version, which we downed by the loaf, as it were. It was basically a sandwich that was dipped liberally in egg and then grilled or pan fried. Made of two slices of thick-cut multi-grain bread (which has a nicer bite when cooked up) with fresh ham, sharp cheese and a couple of slices of tomato stuck in between, with some mustard or tomato chutney for zing. This is gently coated in egg beaten up with a little salt and pepper and finely chopped kothmir and then pan-fried in olive oil with a tiny splodge of butter added to it for flavour. Cut in half and eat with mayonnaise and good company!

Some years later, I was in Khandala on a weekend break with my parents. In between walking miles through the hills and watching the resident golden cobra winding through the rocks in the wall around the house where we were staying, we did our collective best to teach Panduranga the cook how to make boiled eggs – for which I had just then developed a passion. Whether it was altitude of the cold, boiling for even half an hour did nothing to cook the egg beyond very lightly boiled, if at all. After many arguments with the man, we gave up. For the rest of our stay there, if I had to eat breakfast, it was on semi-toasted bread and raw egg yolk – since the glutinous white was too much for my stomach to contemplate. And, after that, whenever I met an egg cooked to that degree of imperfection, it was called the “Panduranga egg”.

Since then, I have stayed away, for the most part, from eggs, except when used in cakes, mayonnaise and an occasional salad inclusion. Like the curate, my tummy and I reserve comment on what they can do for us.