When I was little my grandma, a very proper person, would lay the table for breakfast — a magic trick, I felt, as I crept in pyjama’d and sleepy. A boiled egg would arrive. “Off with its head!” she’d cry as I drove my knife through its shell. That this was always the unspoken execution of a king would not have pleased her monarchism. The egg would be soft-boiled and eaten with not-quite hot brown toast, taken from a rack, smeared with butter and cut into soldiers. In the winter the butter would be too hard, the bread would rip and the soldiers would be damaged.
“They’ve been in the wars.” My grandpa Jim would say. He was a man who breakfasted dressed, if he was off to the office he would be wearing a tie, most likely a humorous one; on weekends, a cravat. He had an alter ego, a duck named Horace, who would emanate quite extraordinarily from his mouth and have grandchildren in paroxysms of laughter.
I’m not sure when, sometime before adolescence, the breakfast laying stopped and the table became more informal. Grandma was a little older and it was quite a lot of fuss, I assumed. But I’m not sure. Perhaps she became a little less formal. Such formality was attributed to her mother, a Scandinavian (because from Norfolk) looking woman who entered service as a teenager and ended up as the head housekeeper of a large hotel. A socialist, she would enjoin my mother not to listen to my grandma. “She’s an awful Tory.” Yet it was this socialist who stopped her going to university.
I never saw grandma eat breakfast, I think she would eat it before everyone else. When she was done bustling around the kitchen she would sit and drink tea from a cup and saucer, briefly, but would soon be up again. Everyone would shout “sit down!” but she refused. Jim cracked his egg all the way around and peeled it, something very alien. When I tried to mimic him my egg became quite full of shell, my hands a little burnt.
On weekdays breakfast at my parents’ was tumultuous, but on weekends it took on a ceremony. My father would call up the stairs asking who wanted bacon and eggs. We would sit around the kitchen table, and first the toast would be thrown onto our plates to be buttered, followed by the eggs. The bacon, tomatoes and mushrooms, neatly in the old cast iron pan, sat in the middle of the table. Two rashers of bacon each and quite the look knowing shock if a guest took more. The bacon, the best in the world, unsmoked streaky from Riverford.
This on Saturday or Sunday — on the other day the breakfast would be eggs alone, most likely boiled. Aged 5 or so, staying with another grandparent for a weekend I was offered bacon and eggs on Saturday and then on Sunday too. I refused the second time, and ponder this decision: a principled stance for such a greedy child. Was I shocked by the excess? At home there were nice painted egg cups from France or horrid egg cups made from a coil that could be used as a spring, which made the beheading hard, but was fun for tricks.
“King Eggbert, I do sentence you to die, not against one tyrant but against tyranny itself.” CHOP. When opening a new Marmite my mother would say “I christen you Marmite.”
I knew I was becoming grownup when I eschewed the irritation of soldiers for the three or four scoops of an egg onto its own piece of toast, thick with good butter. There is no greater pleasure. Lo’ would disagree.
In Staverton — my village — there are two sources of eggs. My mother is most loyal to the eggs of a one-eyed dairy farmer and mistress of the hunt. Hers are sold in a little wooden box attached to the fence, in view of the chickens (sometimes, sometimes they are kept in a field across the road). If we drive past and the sign announces EGGS we’ll swerve and as mother waits, car shoved in the hedge, I’ll buy the box out, dropping coins straight into it, loose. “A money box would be too softy for her.” When there are no more eggs, you turn the sign around to NO EGGS. Lucky and you’ll see the mistress walking from her house in scarlet and riding boots, her hair a mass of thick black curls, cropped short.
For long periods NO EGGS will be unbudging and you’ll know a fox has gotten at the birds, killed most and traumatised the rest. This might be why she hunts: there’s a lot of support for fox-murdering among chicken keepers. The eggs, though, the eggs: they are beautiful, biggish. Looking through my diary I find myself describing their yolks as ‘almost scarlet’, as ‘plummy’, as ‘heavensent’.
I am loyal to the eggs from The Walled Garden, which sits in the middle of the village. I think of them as the new eggs as they've only been sold for four or five years, out of a little trailer alongside cuttings and, when lucky, vegetables. The hens who make them are named for famous women gardeners, though I can’t remember the names, and are visited by Harry, a Norwegian forest cat. The field behind them is farmed by Hot Dog Farmer, who uses a flamethrower to clear his weeds and builds odd, confused structures from discarded conservatory double glazing. The eggs themselves are a little smaller than the mistress’, but finer — more delicate — and with yolk’s of a dark bright orange. But it was their whites which most excited me, having more flavour than any other I know. I impressed this fact on the Walled Gardeners.
Why do I think so much of the eggs of Staverton? Does the egg exhibit terroir? I think not… the eggs from Felix’s house in Sussex, from a large and boisterous flock, are just as good and I doubt I could tell them apart. Is it the breed? No. The Walled Garden eggs are no better than those from the mistress, the former are all odd rare breeds, the latter sensible chickens. Am I entranced because of place, memory, romance? Yes. And rightly so, for it is in such things that are the measure of life, of food. I am most excited when eggs are bought to me from Devon… I treasure them, roost them, do not squander them. Boiled, with bread and good butter or fried, with bread and good butter. I share them with those I love.
Most precious, though, are the eggs from Lo’s grandma. No chickens are more pampered: their food is enriched with snails, collected in a pail from the lanes around the cottage. “What are you doing?” some busybody will ask when seeing this lady grinning as she finds a particularly good snail. “Experiments,” she answers, straight-faced. “I am experimenting with snail slime.” She resents the intrusion into her world, a world in which she puts on her jewellery to feed her chickens, picking her way up the steep and muddy garden. When one is taken by a fox she is devastated, and her husband keeps late-night vigil with his shotgun and nothing but revenge on the mind. “Bloody birds are so expensive.” But the eggs! They are the dream of eggs made real, cream and apricot. There are ducks too, who live in a paddling pool and come into the kitchen to be fed strawberries and cubes of ice, sitting, like well-behaved dogs, on her lap, letting their long necks be stroked.
How I make an Omelette
“I go to fetch good eggs for lunch — I plan to make omelettes for Faye’s arrival. We are all rather merry when Faye arrives, tumbling from the taxi with a gigantic suitcase. The omelettes, simple but with excellent eggs, are delicious and we all drink quite a lot of red wine, and after lunch go swimming.”
So written after Faye visited my childhood home. More and more, the longer since I’ve not lived there, feeding people the bounty of that land has become important: its honey, meat, milk and, most important, its eggs. There is no chic-er lunch.
For one omelette I beat three eggs loosely, wanting the mixture to be orange (deep orange if the eggs are good) with streaks of brighter orange from unmixed yolks and perhaps slicks of pale orange from unmixed white. Into this a little salt and a turn of pepper, folded in. Now heat a thinnish cast iron pan, with a good handle, and throw in a nob of butter. When this is melted, bubbling, pour in the eggs and wait what — thirty seconds? — until the underside has begun to firm up but much before anything looks cooked. Now, with a spatula (I find a wooden spatula more aesthetically appealing here, no scratch of metal on metal) fold one half onto the other. Assist yourself by tipping the pan and don’t worry if you mess up, you will, often until you’ve practised. Cook for thirty or so seconds more, flip, the same again and slide onto a plate. Inside the omelette should be creamy, outside firm but not tough.
I’m always in love with the way you describe the little things of life and memories. It makes me want to cook with my friends and make my own !