This post is also available in: 
English 
Français 
Deutsch
One for breakfast, and another for dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Behold the versatile, yet humble egg! Ordinary yet luxurious. This is the story of an often-underestimated ingredient.
The egg began its career as an Easter currency. Since the early Middle Ages, church leaders strictly prohibited their congregations from consuming meat and eggs during Lent. Chickens continued laying them of course, and with the passing of time, the eggs started piling up. So, what did the devout farmers do with the “egg-cess”? Since they themselves could not revel in the pomp of the cardinals and priests, they preserved the eggs by hard-boiling them. They also knew that the customary rent on the church-owned fields due at Easter could be settled with the surplus eggs. Existing medieval manuscripts show that farms were each required to deliver 100 eggs at Easter. What they smelled like, however, was not recorded! Some of these were brought to the priest on Good Friday for a blessing and were then decorated as special Easter gifts.
The market value of eggs has since progressed in terms of interest payments, embellishment and preservation. The 1899 edition of the “Österreichisches Appetitlexikon” (Austrian Dictionary of Appetite) raved about the “wealth of possibilities with scrambled eggs!” It listed “scrambled eggs with butter and scrambled eggs with gravy, scrambled eggs with bacon and scrambled eggs with cauliflower, scrambled eggs with truffles, scrambled eggs with sardines, with ham, with chives, with cheese, with asparagus.” It praised the “battalion of egg cakes, egg pastries, egg bakes and the egg creams.” The egg was named “one of the pillars of cuisine, the removal of which would cause the art to collapse miserably.”
For a long time, however, the egg was nothing more than a banal supporting ingredient. Cooks used them to whip thinner sauces into voluminous ones or used the egg whites to clarify cloudy beef broths.
It was regional cuisine that rediscovered the versatility of eggs. When chef René Redzepi served his dish “The Chicken and the Egg” in Copenhagen’s legendary Noma restaurant, the gourmet world was presented with a new concept: The Egg.
Diners were brought a raw egg, salt, a little hay oil, a small pan, a teapot and a timer. The diner became the chef. In exactly two minutes they fried an egg, folded in a knob of herb butter, added a few spinach leaves and, as a final touch, seasoned it with herbs from the same region as the hen that laid the egg. And so, the humble egg began its rise to fame in upscale restaurants as a star of meatless cooking.
In recent years, there was hardly a self-respecting restaurant that did not have an “onsen egg” (named after the traditional Japanese method of cooking eggs in hot springs called onsen) on the menu. The secret: they are simmered between 62 °C and 69 °C for up to an hour until the egg white is custardy and the yolk is thick and creamy. It is the Asian version of what was known two generations ago as “lost eggs” (or poached eggs). At Munich’s Werneckhof, the egg is elevated to a luxurious dish of poached eggs with duck liver, Perigord truffle jus and a generous topping of truffle shavings. The trick with poached eggs is to add a dash of vinegar to the simmering water and to create a whirlpool effect; this ensures that the simmering egg white surrounds the fragile, liquid yolk serving as a protective layer.
Trendy bistros have brought back Eggs Benedict: poached eggs on a toasted English muffin with ham and a generous helping of hollandaise sauce. These days, the ham is often replaced with sliced avocado.
Top restaurants transform egg yolks into a seasoning. The yolk is pickled in salt, sugar and lemon zest for at least three days in the refrigerator, dried and then finely grated. It enhances both beef and beetroot tartare.
The belief that chickens lay an egg every day, and two on Sundays, is a myth, but domestic breeds do produce around 300 a year. In comparison, their ancestors laid no more than 60 a year in the wild.
The Bankiva fowl (known today as red junglefowl) from South and Southeast Asia are considered the Adam and Eve of the modern domestic chicken. The Chinese were the first to breed them before the birds migrated to Egypt with merchants, and later to the Roman Empire, and so to Europe.
The many different chicken varieties are usually only appreciated by passionate amateur cooks and professional chefs. There are at least 180 breeds that roam the world – in the wild, in gardens and on farms. They are categorised into three groups depending on what ends up in the pot. Some are plump and meaty, others are bred for their eggs, and the third — so-called dual-purpose chickens — produce both great meat and a good number of eggs.
However, most of us are only familiar with the standard supermarket chickens that are raised on industrial animal farms. There, they are bred for profit — fattened up quickly and reared to produce record-breaking amounts of eggs. They live a sad existence compared to other chickens that can roam free in the open air. Their eggshells are mostly white and brown.
But their luckier counterparts — who have access to daylight and fresh air — produce red, cream, turquoise and bluish eggs year round, not just at Easter. Scientists have discovered that the colour is genetically determined and depends on the hen’s breed. The process begins in the oviduct where the shell gland produces red pigments which come from haemoglobin (the pigment found in blood). The gall bladder produces the yellow pigments. The genetic blueprint determines how much pigment is deposited onto the shell, and in which combination; the result is brownish or reddish shells. Almost every egg is unique, sporting a slightly different shade. As for eggs with a green hue, oocyanin (bile pigment), is responsible for this particular shade. With white eggs, no pigments are deposited. For a sneak preview of an egg’s colour, take a look behind the hen’s earlobe — if it is white, the eggs are white; if it is red, the eggs are usually brown.
Whether soft-boiled, hard-boiled or scrambled, health experts still wag a cautionary finger when it comes to how many eggs one should eat. And there is still no clear answer. The concern lies with the amount of cholesterol they contain and the risk of cardiovascular issues if the body has too much. Medical science does not always agree, but many studies warn against eating one egg a day which could increase the risk of having a stroke. Whether eggs actually have an effect on cholesterol levels is a moot point. With a healthy and varied diet, an egg now and then will certainly do no harm.