Half An Egg Is Better Than One...! (15 November 1976)
How do you divide a raw egg into two equal parts, so that you have as much yolk and as much white in one half as you do in the other?
No, I am not joking – at least, not all that much. You see, since I began living on my own I have had to take an interest in cookery. Being neither a gourmand nor gourmet, I never had much interest before. I can live quite happily on such a small variety of fodder as would give many men acute depression, though it might render their dyspepsia less acute.
All I need is a refill at 8am, 1pm and 6pm, with a hot drink of something milky to go to bed on and nothing in between. Just give me that and you can keep all your cordon bleu stuff.
After all, man has been on earth 4,000,000 years, give or take a day or two, and it is only in the last 4,000, if that, that he has demanded even daily variety. Previously, his variety was mainly seasonal. He killed a whale or an elephant or another man and feasted on the carcass for weeks on end without worrying about anything else. And who shall deny he enjoyed his food as much as we enjoy ours today? He had to enjoy it, or quit. We ignore the past at our peril.
Some well-meaning cooks pile such a variety of grub on the same course that the taste and smell of one bit fights the taste and smell of the next and so on until the whole concoction reaches a state of mutual suicide. This is especially so when it is all washed down with utterly unnecessary plonk. No wonder the tv gourmet gallops. Moreover, the proceedings are often deliberately conducted in a sort of half-light so that you shall not see what you are eating and drinking either. This is supposed to be romantic. Actually, it is the opposite. Being soporific.
In general, I pity the chap whose appetite has to be tickled before he can eat. Obviously, his tummy doesn’t need recharging and he would do much better not to eat or drink at all just then.
Well, as I was saying, eggs have always been a staple part of my diet ever since, as a small boy, I collected them from the nest. I am now told that they are not good for me because they contain something that begins with C and ends with L, and which, when I first heard it, I thought the speaker said was castor oil. If there is anything in that – and I am not saying there isn’t – it is a fine time to tell me when 100,000 or more eggs have already navigated my alimentary canal (without jamming the lock gates).
But about those individual half-eggs. I have a book called Economical Cookery. Published in 1937 or 1938, it contains 1,000 economical recipes. Today we would regard them as stupefyingly economical. For instance, here is the suggested menu for four persons on the first Sunday of November, together with the listed cost of the main items:
BREAKFAST – 2 grapefruits, 8d; ½ packet of cereal, 3½d; 4 sheep’s kidneys, 1s 4d; 2oz streaky bacon, 2d.
MID-DAY MEAL – 4½lb imported sirloin, 5s 1d (this does for four meals, roasted Sunday mid-day, cold Sunday evening, and minced with macaroni Tuesday mid-day); horseradish sauce, 3d; ½ pint Yorkshire pudding, 4½d; 1¼lb potatoes, 1½d; 1½lb cabbage, 3d; apple flan, 9d.
EVENING MEAL – cold beef; salad 9d; tinned loganberries, 10½d; cup custard comprising 1 pint milk, 2 eggs and sugar, 7d.
None of the four would have starved on that little lot, would they? Yet the total listed cost for the day, if my numeracy is not at fault, is only 8s 11½d, or a little less than 2s 3d per person, which in today’s decimated currency would be fractionally over 10p.
Dirt cheap, youngsters might say. But if those four persons were a mum, a dad and two growing lads, it would have taken more than dad’s not unlikely wage of £3 to feed them for seven days at that rate. The answer, or course, is that Sunday was special. They were down to mince by Tuesday at the latest. In fact, the book offers a selection of 42 dishes (presumably for two persons) costing 6d or less.
Sunday’s cup custard gives a clue to my problem. If any recipe decrees two eggs for four people, it doesn’t take an egghead to realise that this equals half an egg for one – and neither more nor less if the culinary balance is to be preserved.
“Scramble it raw, then divide it,” you might advise. But remember that eggs are now costing the equivalent of 9d or 10p apiece, compared with the book’s 1½d, being 24p for six. We have to mind our p’s more than our q’s nowadays. There is no margin for experiments.
So are you sure? Have you tried it? Or is there a fair chance I would be chasing a glutinous mess round the kitchen before it finally escaped down the plughole? If successful, there is the further problem of finding something useful for the remaining half-egg. There is also the fact that some eggs are bigger than others. But then, we’ll hatch our chickens one at a time, shall we?
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