Fried eggs - a quickie

"A perfectly fried egg is a glory to behold - crispy edges and a wobbly, pinkish yolk. ... When considering a recipe for fried eggs, this is the pertinent question - how DO you like them? It's very personal." Delia Smith

I'm not sure there's a lot to say about fried eggs, but today when, for very different reasons, I was looking for pictures, I came across this rather lovely photograph of fried eggs. I think it was a winner of some food photography competition. So I thought - well why not do a post on fried eggs.

'Pinkish yolk'. Well that's what Delia said which made me wonder what on earth she was talking about. But of course what she is talking about is this:

Which is actually how I remember the fried eggs of my youth. Well sometimes. Fried eggs were one of the things that caused my mother and I to have big arguments in the morning. Well not the fried egg per se but the whole notion of breakfast really. Because I am not a morning girl, and struggling out of bed and then having to eat the full English breakfast - egg, bacon, fried bread, was really not my thing. So we argued, because, of course, my mother, was doing the right thing by her beliefs in giving us a good breakfast to set us up for the day.

But I digress a bit. Back to how you cook them. Well there are lots of opinions and if you want to get the lowdown then go to Felicity Cloake, who, of course, has done a pretty good survey of the options. She, by the way prefers hers to look like this.

Delia's 'pinkish' yolk is obtained by basting the egg with your fat whilst you cook. There are those who actually flip them over to give a rather more substantial covering to the yolk, but this requires a certain amount of skill and the potential of breaking the yolk. And then it's ruined because the yolk will run out and the yolk will set.

The one thing that everyone seemed to agree on was that the egg for frying should be fresh - then the white doesn't spread out all over the pan. Though I guess if you have one of those metal rings that would be prevented.

I do like fried eggs. We also occasionally had them for a not very healthy dinner of fried eggs and chips. At the end of the month when the money was running out I suspect. I used to love putting the egg on top of the chips, then breaking the egg, so that the yolk ran all over the yolks. Or putting it on a slice of fried bread and doing the same. I cringe really to think how unhealthy this all was. Particularly as the fat it was all cooked in was probably what we called dripping - the rendered fat from the various meats that we ate during the week. My mother would put the bits of fat in a dish and then put it in the oven when she was cooking something else. The fat that came out was poured into a dish and stored in the larder. This dish was added to all the time, so that it had a delicious, meaty, but always different taste. We sometimes had toast and dripping for a treat. It's amazing I'm still alive really. Though I do take pills for my high cholesterol.

Anyway - fried eggs. One of those simple, basic things in life which are not quite as easy to cook as you might think, and with which you can do any number of things - like shakshuka, which is way more exotic that fried eggs and chips.

Really I just liked the photograph.