In praise of the free range egg . . . a delicacy all too rare

Date Published: 16-Jun-2011

My father, God rest him, was an excellent cook. Widowed early, he had to learn to put a meal on the table for his five children . . . but I don’t think he would take offence at my saying that he couldn’t boil an egg!

At Christmas he would produce a turkey that was mouth-watering. He could whip-up a stew with a chop, a bone cadged from the butcher, a single rasher and a unique blend of spuds, celery, onions and parsnips, which would have us queuing for dinner as the aroma wafted around the house.

He always made enough soup so that in Winter, there would be a pot left on the Rayburn cooker in the kitchen where you could dip in and enjoy a mug of soup for one more day.

But his idea of a boiled egg was two to three minutes! He was the maestro of the runny egg . . . and it resulted in so many standoffs, rows and problems at breakfast time that I often wondered why he simply didn’t give in and boil the damned things for a few minutes longer.

Of course, he was one of those who helped by his idea of the perfectly cooked egg.

The mere thought of his runny egg was enough to make the gorge rise in me, and, when confronted with one of his concoctions at the table, I point blank refused to eat the egg. To make matters worse, he would then mix up the white and the yolk and try to explain that it was in some way more palatable.

It is not an exaggeration to say that sometimes the standoff would last half an hour. He would tell me of kids who’d be glad to eat the egg, how egg was good for me, that soft-boiled meant that all the goodness was still there . . . as a concession, I would take a huge lump of bread into my mouth, then a spoon of the egg and wait until his back was turned before spitting it out again.

So, how come I end up writing in praise of the boiled egg, you ask? Well, this is more than 50 years later, now I boil my own eggs for a respectable six minutes . . . and, if perchance, it turns out to be a little bit on the hard-boiled side, why then I simply add a knob of butter to it.

I was put on the ‘supply list’ of a friend who keeps a few chickens in the backyard and the eggs are quite spectacular in their quality. The quality comes from hens scratching about for hours on end, picking a bits of grass, household leftovers from the table, and no pressure on them to produce.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.