Eggscuse me, Mr Putin, we need them to cook

A recipe for easy Hollandaise sauce

An arsenal of questions to ask strangers you’re unwittingly cemented next to at table or on a delayed plane is handy to have if you don’t want to rely on the embarrassing selection your parents resorted to in their inquisition of your paramours. Those questions, which didn’t delve much further than “What school did you go to?”, or “What is it that do you do?”, were more assessments than curiosity. I prefer, “When you became an adult, what one thing that you were forced to do in childhood did you vow never to do again?”

Mine was: Eat eggs. Every single day of our school years, our mother stuck a hard boiled egg in front of my sister and me. It was partly the fault of novelist Fay Weldon who, when she worked at Britain’s Egg Marketing Board, came up with the (ingeniously punning) slogan, “Go to work on an egg.” My mother took it to heart.

But when you can’t get hold of an egg, a good many cooking options cease. A shortcrust pastry? A cake? A souffle? Egg use cuts right across the culinary board. While the West’s sanctions against Russia don’t seem to have had any significant impact on Putin’s sale of oil to countries happy to import it in vast quantity - India, China, Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, for starters - Russian babushkas are now desperately short of eggs.

In one year, eggs in Russia have soared in price by 40 percent. On social media, never safe platforms in Russia for revealing an opinion, clicks are mounting for a meme of a man on bended knee offering his intended not a ring but a box of eggs. She turns him down, saying they’re far too expensive. At his end-of-the-year news conference, when Putin was asked about the rocketing cost of them, he could only mumble that the problem was being addressed. But Russian producers can’t afford to import chickens; they are short of the labour needed to run the hatcheries; and the high cost of feed and fuel are making eggs unprofitable.

Eggs have been eaten, originally raw, for the thousands of years since pre-history, that period between the first known use of stone tools and the invention of writing. There’s evidence chickens had become domesticated in South East Asia before 7500 BC. By 1500 BC, they had arrived in Egypt, by 800 BC in Greece, where previously quails had supplied the eggs.

A basket of eggs, part of an offering at the ancient Egyptian tomb of Menna

By the Middle Ages, eggs had become forbidden during Lent, ostensibly because they were too rich. But it’s more likely that it was recognised that chickens needed a laying break, and that fallow end of winter period was a good choice as feed became expensive.

During the 1990s in the US, eggs were given a bad rap. Under no circumstances should anyone have gone to work on an egg. It had been decided high levels of bad LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol in egg yolks increased the risk of cardiovascular disease which led to egg fear and the birth of the grim egg-white omelette. Since then, we’ve learned our levels of cholesterol are mostly made by our livers from the saturated fats and trans fats in foods we eat and not from the mere 1.5 grams of saturated fat contained in a large egg. Besides, we were missing a whole lot of stuff in eggs that is very good for us. So feel free to go to work on one.

And we are. The number of eggs produced globally, according to 2021 figures, the most recent, is more than 1,177.37 billion eggs a year, from over 6.4 million hens which lay more than three hundred eggs each annually. Exhausting.

With those numbers and that length of history, you’d think we’d know how to look after them.

Talk to a person who has them scratching around in a coop, and more likely than not, they’ll tell you never to wash them and certainly not to store them in the fridge. The first injunction is because a protective layer on the eggshell shields eggs from contamination. The second is that when eggs have been held in the cold and are then taken out to reach room temperature for cooking, any existing bacteria growth on the shell can be activated and promoted which would contaminate the contents of the egg, particularly if the egg has been washed as supermarket eggs are. However, notice that supermarkets, keenly alert to any possibility of a law suit, never refrigerate eggs.

On the downside, they assign them Use By dates that would make a farmer snort. If you’re in any doubt about the freshness of your egg, just crack it open and give the contents a sniff. Another indicator is if the white and the yolk are in any way liquid. If you’re still unsure, fill a large bowl with water. If your egg sinks, it is fresh. If it floats - or even if it simply tilts upwards - bin it. The tilting indicates that as the egg’s water has evaporated through the shell, the air pocket inside the egg has grown larger and been replaced by air.

The English pickle eggs. I shan’t even go there. The Chinese bury them. Not for a thousand years, but for a hundred days, in a mixture of lime, ash and salt. Duck not hens’ eggs are the ones most commonly used.

Should you want to cure eggs, Chinese TV chef, diplomat, food writer, restaurateur, and tennis player the late Kenneth Lo, would dissolve salt in a little water in a large bowl then slowly stir in pine ash and lime until he reached a mixture like mud. He smothered the eggs in this then rolled them in a tray of rice or bran husks to stop them sticking to one another or to the large earthenware jar into which he packed them. Every three days he would remove and re-settle them, then after fifteen days seal the jar and leave it for a month. Forty five days after starting the cure, the eggs would be ready to eat.

Eggs still cause alarm - in certain recipes. I hope this Tabled will dispel any fear you may have of making a souffle. My own egg insecurity once lay with Hollandaise sauce. Too often, making it the orthodox way, it split. Here is a cheat technique that’s not only foolproof but speedy. Any minute now, the fresh season’s asparagus will be on sale so you can practice getting ready by making this recipe for your breakfast Eggs Benedict. But today is Valentine’s Day, which I do hope you have good reason to be aware of, and Hollandaise Sauce renders even the simplest steamed fish seductive.

For 180ml/¾ cup of Hollandaise

120g/½ cup butter
3 egg yolks
juice ½ lemon
salt to taste

Melt the butter and keep it hot but do not allow to brown.

Drop the egg yolks into the jug of a blender, add the lemon juice and salt and put on a low speed, gradually and very slowly adding the melted butter.