Boiled eggs

When someone says, 'Oh, I can't even boil an egg,' what they are actually saying is, 'I can't cook anything at all.'" Delia Smith

Which probably means I can't cook, because I have to admit my boiled eggs are a bit hit and miss - unless they are hard-boiled ones. Which is fine if you are making something, like potato salad, say, that requires hard-boiled eggs. Just boil them for a long time and you will get a hard-boiled egg. But I guess you can even spoil that. I guess if it's too well done it's just hard and rubbery. Anyway I'm not that great at it. Though my lovely daughter-in-law did give me this Japanese gadget which does actually work.

As the egg cooks the colour changes on those sort of rings.

Back in the day, of course, one had the sand running things - like this very beautiful example:

I have a vague memory of my mother having one of these (well a much plainer one), but I think she also had a clockwork timer. And you do need to time the boiling of your egg somehow. The timings differ depending on whether you put your egg into boiling water or cold water and boil it up with the egg in it. But there is a scale that you can follow. And Coles Magazine published its version in their March Magazine. And if you google it you will find no end of advice on how to cook the perfect egg, and no end of ways to do it either. Once again it seems the simplest things become, in fact, the most complicated. Simple is hard.

"The best way to figure out what works for your setup is to boil a dozen eggs and start pulling the eggs out of the water in thirty-second increments after about 3 minutes. But who wants to waste that many eggs?" No Recipes

Indeed. The timings on this website seem to match the various timings I have seen elsewhere. And Coles offered this guide on the left from their latest magazine. But maybe you do need to do as No Recipes advises and test it out with a dozen. Not really. But there are so many variables - how big is the egg? How fresh is it? How quickly does your water come to the boil? Is your egg straight out of the fridge or not? How hard are you boiling it?

"You know how you get good at boiling eggs? Practice. Hours of dogged practice. It's like Beckham's free kicks and muscle memory." Guardian How to Eat

And in a way this is exactly what all the gurus say, though they hide it behind a whole lot of rules and 'tips'. And I don't get that much practice because my husband hates them and I never seem to get around to having one myself. So I could say I can't boil an egg.

And why don't I eat them? I think it's because they are sort of associated with children. Indeed the few that I have cooked in the recent past have been for my grandchildren - but even they seem to have grown out of them. They certainly never ask me for one. Maybe it's because I do such a bad job. Perhaps they had one too runny or too hard egg too many.

Boiled eggs don't feature much in trendy breakfast places do they? It's mostly poached - very trendy, fthen fried and then scrambled. But not very often boiled. I do remember various French bed and breakfasts offering boiled eggs for their breakfasts - and they were probably from their own hens too. And I did have them - though sometimes they were, surprisingly, cold and hard-boiled. Ok to spread on a lovely french baguette, but not to be eaten with something to dip into it.

Coles, at least, have offered a few different suggestions for what you can dip into your egg - which would indeed make it more trendy - starting with asparagus wrapped in smoked salmon. Other suggestions included:

pizza - cut into lengths!

grilled haloumi strips, crumpets cut into lengths

cherry tomatoes on skewers.

They had 12 suggestions in all. They were fairly varied and therefore would probably give you other ideas.

Then there are all those cutesy egg cosies that you can put on top of your boiled egg. - also a childish thing. Maybe that's why we don't eat boiled eggs. We don't want to be thought of as childish.

They are sort of the ultimate comfort food aren't they? Nostalgic of childhood and simple things. When all's well with the world.

"Soon they were all sitting on the rocky ledge, which was still warm, watching the sun go down into the lake. It was the most beautiful evening, with the lake as blue as a cornflower and the sky flecked with rosy clouds. They held their hard-boiled eggs in one hand and a piece of bread and butter in the other, munching happily. There was a dish of salt for everyone to dip their eggs into. ‘I don’t know why, but the meals we have on picnics always taste so much nicer than the ones we have indoors,’ said George." Enid Blyton