A Thousand Eggs

I’ve been making breakfast for my kids ever since they got off baby mush. I make the same breakfast every morning, with a few variables: carbs (cinnamon toast, waffles, corn muffin, English muffin, cereal, or Nutella on bread), fruit (melon, strawberries, or blueberries), and a scrambled egg. Always one egg, scrambled.

When it was only my son eating, I gave him a portion of the egg and ate the rest myself. Now I split the egg between my son and daughter, though my son eats so much I could probably make two eggs and give him more. I may do that soon, but I’m resisting. One egg. That’s the routine and the ritual.

By luck of the draw in terms of our morning process, I end up making breakfast a bit more often than my wife. My oldest kid is five, almost six, and has been eating my breakfasts since age one. Subtracting days due to traveling or eating out or visiting relatives or any other scenario sans morning meal, and I’ve made about a thousand of these breakfasts. I’ve cooked a thousand eggs. Before the child-rearing phase of my life, I had probably cooked about twenty eggs, total.

Otherwise, I don’t cook much. I prepare things, in the honorable way of the stereotypical, cliched American male. The only recipe I know by heart is red beans and rice—a simple Creole variation my family picked up when we lived in New Orleans. It’s not a hard recipe, but it does require a lot of time for simmering and sauteing, not to mention how strangely difficult it can be for a novice to find a pork bone in Manhattan. But I haven’t made red beans and rice in years. I love to eat, and I enjoy cooking when motivated. But in the normal course of life, the thought of cooking almost never occurs to me. I just don’t have the gene for it.

For me, cooking a daily egg in my simple and clueless way creates a soothing interlude, a semicolon between phrases of morning child administration. I know I’m not scrambling the egg right, according to most. I don’t bother to whisk or blend. I haven’t researched tips or tricks or what Escoffier says. I resist anyone else’s suggestions or advice on how to cook the daily egg. This is my egg.

I did take one piece of advice, however. I was about halfway through my thousand eggs when I started melting butter in the pan before adding the egg. This was a revolutionary change for me. I had always added butter to taste (for the kids, remember), but I just dumped the egg on top of the unmelted butter and let everything merge as it wished. My wife’s several insistent demonstrations of melting butter pre-egg eventually won me over. The thin layer of butter helps the egg cook more evenly, and it makes the pan easier to clean afterward. I still don’t stir or whisk the egg before cooking, like you should for a really thorough scramble. Where’s the fun in that? It’s cheating. My egg ends up cooked a little differently each day. Sometimes it’s a perfect scramble, sometimes more of an omelet, sometimes little more than a macerated fried mess. Part of the pleasure of my daily egg is coordinating preparation of the whole breakfast with the cooking of the egg, plating the rest so the egg arrives last, still hot, in whatever form the fates decree.

Though I haven’t studied proper methodologies of scrambling eggs, I did go through a crisis of confidence about cracking eggs. In pre-parental days, I cracked the egg against the rim of the skillet. In my mind’s eye, I had so light a touch, back then, that the eggshell would barely fracture, leaking only slightly. Then I popped the egg open, splitting it neatly in half and dumping its contents into the pan. Maybe I was just remembering Sabrina. When I started cooking eggs in earnest, I failed at this method ninety percent of the time. The egg shattered messily against the rim, or the rim split the egg in two (half the egg in the pan, the other half running down the outside of the pan and into the burner). I was convinced I could re-master this bravado egg-cracking technique, but finally I watched a few YouTube tutorials to learn a more orthodox style: rapping the egg on a flat surface, which for me means the bottom of the pan, right after the butter has melted. Now my eggs crack properly ninety percent of the time. A delicate twist in one hand between thumb, forefinger, and middle finger, and egg pops open like a jewel box. Into the hot pan it goes. Who’s to say I couldn’t be a chef?

Once in the pan, I have about thirty seconds before I should stir the egg. Right about then, the egg white is firm but not rigid, while the yolk perches liquid and oblivious above the coming heat. I handle other stage business during this intermission, like cutting up melon or pouring juice or taking waffles out of the toaster. I listen for sizzling from the pan, which means the egg has started to fry. A little bit of that is okay around the edges for texture’s sake, but too much frying threatens the integrity of the scramble. Of course, I could just sit there and watch my egg and get the timing just right. But again, this feels like cheating. My short-order cook fantasy requires preparing several items at once for my two customers, going from start to finish in about seven minutes.

On the rare occasions when I cook eggs for myself, I’ll try an omelet with all kinds of stuff—multiple eggs, peppers, onions, garlic, paprika, cheese, meat, whatever comes to hand, which is obviously nothing too exotic. I start with the eggs in the pan, and by rights I should let the eggs cook till they form a matrix with some small chance of holding the junk I’m throwing in. But I have no patience for it, so I end up combining everything at once, producing a garbage pile of ingredients that one might charitably call a casserole. It’s delicious but doesn’t have even the rough elegance of a scramble, much less an omelet. I’m sure if I ever really tried to make a decent omelet, I could do it (eventually). I’m also sure I would be insufferably proud of myself for cooking something most people could manage half-asleep and hungover. But either way, there’s no chance I would cook such a dish every day. That ritual is too complicated.

When the daily egg is ready to scramble, I draw the ladle across the yolk to break it, blending yolk with white. If the egg white has cooked too far, it will resist the yellow of the yolk and the two will cook merely adjacent, rather than united. This is not unpleasing to the eye or the palate, but it really does venture too far into fried egg territory. Though it’s oddly satisfying when the whole fried-ish egg moves around the pan at the ladle’s prodding, that’s not why we’re here. That’s not this ritual. Triage on a failed, fried scramble is to fold it over on itself and mash it up, attempting to at least simulate the scrambley look. You’ll never fool the chicken coroner, but it’s still an acceptable daily egg.

My son devours his egg, even though it’s not his favorite part of breakfast. He devours his meals. He informs other adults, quite seriously, that he is an “eating machine,” after I once called him that due to his voracious growing-boy appetite. My daughter is more of a grazer, and she requires more encouragement, blandishments, bribes, or threats to eat her eggs. When they’re done and have been released from the breakfast ritual, I’ll bus the table and wipe it down. Egg debris is tricky because it smears if you wipe it carelessly. Instead you have to brush it off into your hand, then wipe the residue. Once the table is clean and the dishes are in the sink, I’ll put the egg pan in to soak for a bit before washing. We used to have nonstick pans, but a relative insisted we change to stainless steel due to health concerns about nonstick coatings. I resisted that change too until the new pans arrived at our doorstep, and they are prettier. Even so, I could just clean the egg pan right away. Soaking doesn’t really help much in the long run, but it’s the end of the ritual.

I scramble one daily egg because my daughter doesn’t eat eggs with enthusiasm. Not yet. When she starts eating even a little bit more, I’ll have to make two eggs per day to feed both kids. The impact on the ritual will be minimal, I know. It might be less embarrassing if my resistance to two eggs stemmed from a sappy father’s dislike of children growing, changing, time passing. Maudlin though expected. But I cling to one egg for reasons even more selfish and foolish. I love novelty and change and evolution in every stripe of life save the domestic, where I have always been a creature of habits, which become routines, which become rituals. I find peace in these rituals far beyond their practical significance. The more mundane and trivial, the better. It’s not spiritual—if anything, it’s anti-spiritual, hypermaterial, motions performed without thought. I’ve overthought it already, in fact. If the ritual survived melted butter, it can survive two eggs. I’ll try not think about it further, or what other changes are coming.

Originally published on Medium, 8/25/2014.