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The Good Egg

Versatile and reliable, this aliment is more than just a staple.

When Minnesota native Katie Gathright opens her vacation-style cooking school, Chez Gautier, in southwestern France next summer, she plans to deliver not only cooking lessons, but an experience. Students will sleep in stone cottages on her farm and ease into the slow pace of provincial French life. They will use regional and seasonal ingredients, says the classically trained chef, and these will always include eggs. “At least two or three times a week, my neighbor comes over with fresh, fresh eggs with the most yellow yolks you have ever seen,” Gathright says. “We eat them all the time. They’re such a part of our daily life there; they’ve taken on new meaning for me.”

It’s appropriate that Gathright re-discovered eggs in the land of omelets and quiche, but it really could happen anywhere. Since the history of the egg is as long as the history of humans, most countries have traditional dishes in which eggs play a key role—from Italian spaghetti carbonara to Chinese egg rolls, to cite two familiar examples. Truly, eggs are a dietary staple around the world, a perfect little symbol of birth and life. We Americans know them as inexpensive and reliable, the ultimate comfort food, right up there with casseroles and chicken noodle soup. That cozy familiarity is probably why it’s easy to forget that there are hundreds of ways to prepare eggs that go far beyond fried, scrambled, and poached.

Just ask Carl Antholz, a chef who teaches cooking classes at Kitchen Window in Minneapolis. It’s only a bit of hyperbole to say that, given enough time, Antholz could list a million ways to treat an egg. He gushes about their versatility, how they bind, emulsify, clarify, thicken, leaven, and more, before hopping from recipe to recipe and fact to fact. Information such as how to make the perfect hard-cooked egg naturally leads into the story of how he once upped the gourmet quotient by rolling such an egg on the counter, then setting it in black tea for a couple of hours. When peeled, the egg looked etched, and he served it sliced, with tiny dollops of citrusy-sweet minced kumquat and salty black caviar.

“My whole basic philosophy is to find the highest quality ingredients and keep them as pure as they can be,” Antholz says. “Eggs are about as pure and simple as you can get. The higher the quality, the less you want to do with it.”

Both he and Gathright are proponents of starting with fresh, high quality eggs. If you don’t happen to have a neighbor who regularly stops by with just-laid eggs, however, it’s best to buy them in manageable quantities from your nearby farmers’ market or natural-foods store, with an eye for local and organic. Then, try a simple treatment that allows the egg to shine through.

Carl recommends coddling—basically soft-boiling an egg from within a screw-top, single-serving-sized porcelain, glass, or pottery dish called a coddler. Coddlers are often painted or glazed with a design and double as serving dishes, perfect for an upscale brunch or a self-contained side dish.

Another throwback technique worth revisiting is shirring, during which eggs are baked covered in milk or cream. Gathright uses crème fraîche and grated Gruyère in her take on shirred eggs, which she likes to concoct in a heavy metal flea-market find she calls “the perfect shirred egg dish.” Antholz prefers to use ramekins for shirred eggs to avoid overcooking. “You want them just baked through and soft in the center,” he says.

No surprise that quiche is a popular dish in the Gathright household. “It sounds stereotypical, being in France, but it’s true. I serve quiche with a salad for lunch or dinner,” Katie says. “We feel good after we eat eggs. They make the perfect meal.”

Berit Thorkelson is a freelance writer in St. Paul.