It’s been a while, I know it has. (Over 3 months.) I apologize for that, but I’m sure you all understand why it has been harder to write since March — not just for me, but for many. Of course, even as I wasn’t updating this blog, I was cooking and baking a lot. There have been periods where I bake bread twice a week — usually the same recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Bread Bible, in which every recipe is a winner but particularly the classic white sandwich loaf. A thing that I like to do with that bread is eat it with a sunny side up or over easy or soft boiled egg: something with a lot of runny yolk that soaks into the bread and gets around your mouth and fingers.
I’ve been reading Ruby Tandoh’s Eat Up, which I was lucky to find a copy of at Omnivore Books in San Francisco last winter (for some reason this book is really difficult to find stateside). It’s made me think about the messiness of eating, and what a joy it is to eat with your fingers (whether you cook with them or not). And when I have a loaf of fresh bread, my favorite messy thing to eat is an egg on toast.
I did not eat eggs for much of my life, until I was 23 and back in Kingston for homecoming on total impulse and hungover as shit on Sunday morning. My friends and I went to Megalos and I got an eggs benedict burger and found, to my surprise, that I liked it a lot. Cautious but experimental, I was at an airport &pizza and decided to get eggs on my pizza, reasoning that if I didn’t like them I could just remove them. I liked them.
The next quest was to learn how to cook them, which I did with the help of a cookbook from a restaurant I had never been to. I knew from the burger and pizza that I liked runny yolks, so I focused on sunny side up eggs (I was scared to risk breaking the yolk of an over easy egg). And at some point I put one of these eggs on toast, and ate it with my hands instead of making more silverware to wash, and I’ve not looked back since.
The basket
One egg per slice of bread
Fresh sandwich bread
Butter, ghee or oil
Salt
Pepper (optional, and does not have to be freshly cracked)
Slice of melty cheese (optional)
The path
Put your cooking fat into a small cast-iron pan, or whatever you have that you like to make eggs in. Turn the heat to medium. Wait for the fat to heat (if butter, wait until the bubbling subsides a bit; if an oil, look for it to turn shimmery). Crack your egg into the pan. Salt it.
Toast your bread lightly if it wasn’t baked in the last 24 hours; if it is still super fresh, leave it be. If you have a slice of American cheese or something else thin that likes to melt, put it on your bread now.
Let the egg cook until the whites are set. If you don’t like the viscous albumen around the yolk, but don’t want to risk overcooking the yolk, flip the egg and leave it face down for 5 seconds. (Literally, count them.) Then flip back up and onto your toast. Shake some pepper on if you like.
Wait just a moment for it to cool slightly so that you don’t burn your tongue (you will probably burn it anyway). Pick it up with your hands. Take a bite. The yolk will drip onto the plate and your clothes and your chin and your fingers. That’s okay. You can dredge a corner of toast in it, or scrape it off with your fingers and lick it, or lick it off to start with.
The toast will be gone before you know it, but for the next few hours you may find bits of dried egg yolk under your nails or in a spot on your chin or near your mouth that you thought you already got. Wipe it off when you find it and go about your day, which started off so very messy and so very right.