Essays

From ODE to an EGG

The Garden of Eden was not a good book, but I was so busy reading Hemingway's descriptions of food, especially eggs, that it took me several years to notice. Like so many things, the book begins with eggs: As newlyweds, Hemingway informs us, the Bournes eat them each morning, excited just to contemplate the manner of cooking them. The husband never abandons his joyful consumption of oeufs au jambon and eventually finds happiness in love and work. The wife begins to skip breakfast about midway through. Things turn out badly for her.

In English the word egg is something to cup in one's palm. On the page, the extra g, like a linguistic wink, lends the word the same oblong shape as the thing itself. Egg nestles against the curve of the tongue.

In its shell it is all smoothness and balance. Next to it, other kinds of beauty seem bony and embellished, and at times I think the nutmeg speckling on a blue egg is as much as we can hope for. Yet the egg lends its beauty generously—witness the way egg tempera allows itself to be saturated with color; the chalky aura that bathes a Vermeer, as though the painter has cast his light through a broken shell.

M.F.K. Fisher mused that the egg is privacy itself. As a metaphor for self-containment, only the oyster comes close, but its rough-ribboned shell lacks the egg's tranquility. The oyster must clamp itself closed, while the egg simply has not noticed anyone else.

The Oxford Companion to Food calls the egg an "unintentional gift," which is a self-deceiving way of saying we steal them. In other animals such behavior seems especially rapacious, not to mention sneaky. The dinosaur known as oviraptor ("egg thief"), got its name when its skeleton was discovered on a cache of fossilized eggs. Scientists assumed the dinosaur was stealing them rather than warming them and christened it accordingly. Misunderstood or not, such a creature lacks grandeur. It seems poor sport to eat the unborn. The killers we most admire—the tigers, the grizzlies—are the John Waynes of the animal world. They have no need to assume the creepy delicacy of a mongoose slithering into the hen house.

But we humans, sly lot, are the greatest oviraptors of all, and we will never admit it. We'll never compare ourselves to the mongoose or the weasel, because it might turn our egg-love into something that feels prurient and deceitful. We believe we are in it for commerce or gourmandise, that the matter-of-fact hand beneath the hen is retrieving only what it's owed, or that the pleasure in pearls of caviar bursting against the roofs of our mouths is near-godly delectation.
We are kidding ourselves, of course; the delight we feel at the discovery of an unexpected cluster of eggs is pure animal gratitude for protein, for succulence, for easy pickings. The beachcomber who unearths a clutch of leathery turtle eggs warmed in the sand, the diner who finds a cache of coral upon cracking the lobster shell, and the fishermen who slice open a sturgeon to discover the black burst fruit of its roe all treat the discovery as though it were a pile of gold coins. When it comes to an egg, any egg, humans are pure avarice. Hence, the egg is an animal's most vulnerable possession. The egg is its secret.

The love of eggs is a love for the tiny and tender—pinkie-sized squash, potatoes like marbles, three-week-old chickens, skinny-limbed lambs and calves—but taken one step backwards. To us it feels wholesome, as though there is no kinder thing on earth than to give someone a plate of eggs, but every now and again you get a reminder what you're dealing with. You crack a shell and find the freak egg: its yellow orb twinned like a biology experiment, a bloody vein buried in the meat of the yolk.