My Breakfast

I have before me an egg. It is poached to Perfection, the lustrous orange of its yolk resplendent against the expansive, blemish-free nullity of the white, like a torrid, late summer sun discharging its radiance through the misty wraith of dawn. Without doubt, my egg is superior to all other eggs hereabouts - the eggy quintessence. Those possessed of lesser eggs must envy me. The problem is, however, save for my part in the poaching process, I can't take much credit for it. I bought this egg in a carton of a dozen from Waitrose, all of which were essentially indistinguishable from one another when viewed from the outside. Therefore I couldn't actually tell whether I'd got a really shit egg or a truly superlative one until each was cracked open.

Surely, this is an iniquitous situation, exactly akin to going to a car showroom where they sell you a car in an unlabelled box, so you don't know whether it's a Ferrari or a Skoda until you've got it home and opened it. Would such a car showroom stay in business for long? I doubt it. Ideally, eggs should be without shells, then you'd be able to gauge their quality at a glance. In fact, in their early stages, eggs are without shells. You can, for example, go to a kosher butcher and buy a chicken - they call it a "boiler" - containing unlaid, shell-less eggs. (And very pleasant they are, too, served up in a soup or stew.)

But, by necessity, an egg develops a shell before being laid. If it didn't, and the hen ejected it as just a liquid mass of yolk and white, the result, when it came to term, would probably be a round, flat chicken. (Unless the hen ejected it into a purpose-built, chicken-shaped mould, of course.) Perhaps, then, we should look to frogs for a solution.

Frogs' eggs, or "spawn" as they're known, are transparent. I've never tried to boil or poach one, but if I ever did, I'd know exactly which to boil or poach simply by looking at it. This would make things a lot easier. So in my opinion, we should breed hybrid chicken/frogs and get our eggs from them. As an added bonus, the hybrid creature would probably produce several hundred eggs each time it laid. On the down-side, we might never get a perfect orange yolk. In a worst case scenario, the yolks would be black, exactly like the yolks in frog spawn. In combination with the white, this would result in grey scrambled eggs and grey omelettes. Just looking at them would undoubtedly fill me with depression and a loathing for life. Every time I cooked an omelette or scrambled eggs, Ingmar Bergman would come into my kitchen and make moody, depressive black and white Swedish language films about me, lamenting the futility of my existence. Consequently, I'd have to take lithium all the time, otherwise I'd attempt suicide with each and every omelette and quiche. Or else I'd try to fuck Liv Ullmann, or she'd try to fuck me, either of which is probably just as bad as suicide. Or a good excuse for it, anyway.