The egg is a chef’s ultimate test. According to legend, the hundred folds in a chef’s toque represent mastery of a hundred egg dishes. When I ask culinary heartthrob Jacques Pépin about eggs, he quotes a nineteenth-century French cooking bible: “The egg is to cuisine what the article is to speech.” That is, you can’t do a thing in the kitchen without one. In this, the masters agree. Auguste Escoffier’s legendary cookbook notes “there are very few culinary recipes that don’t include eggs.” Food science megastar Harold McGee writes that eggs’ “contents are primal, the unstructured stuff of life. This is why they are protean, why the cook can use them to generate such a variety of structures.” The word “protean,” of course, comes from the Greek god Proteus, an old man of the sea, and means that something is as changeable and versatile as water. It is a good word for an ingredient that can clarify soups, foam meringue, raise baked goods, and so much more.1
There is just something about eggs. J. Kenji López-Alt earned my undying gratitude for his double-blind experiment hard-boiling seven hundred eggs for the New York Times. When I get the cookbook author and my personal culinary hero on the phone, he tells me, “Eggs have this mystique about them because they are so versatile and sensitive.” That versatility translates to more egg dishes than colors in the Pantone catalog—and each person has their specific favorite shade. People have Opinions about eggs. Jonathan Swift knew it when he used them in his novel Gulliver’s Travels. The nation of Lilliput had fractured—and gone to war with its neighbor Blefuscu—over whether to crack a boiled egg at the big or little end first. Kenji knows how deep egg preferences go too. “Eggs are always the most popular subject I write about,” he said. “It’s guaranteed that people are going to read it and talk about it and argue about it.” Not only do people have preferences, but they are experts in their own right. “It’s the first food that most people cook,” he adds, and it’s a food so commonly eaten that “people have more expertise in cooking eggs than in most things.”2
I wrote one of my college essays on the egg chapter of my parents’ 1974 edition of Betty Crocker, which began, “The man you marry will know the way he likes his eggs. And chances are he’ll be fussy about them. So it behooves a good wife to know how to make an egg behave in six basic ways.” The housewife’s toque, presumably, only includes six folds.3
In addition to having Opinions and Feelings about the old version of Betty Crocker, I have definite ones about how to cook an egg. I enjoy many styles of eggs, but there is one thing I can’t abide: rubbery, browned, hard eggs. (A crispy fried edge is the exception that proves the rule.) My basic philosophy is “pudding texture or get off my lawn.” But the loose French scramble that is perfection to me is a Lovecraftian nightmare for my friend Jason, who prefers his eggs quite solid. To my vegan friends, meanwhile, eggs might as well be ashes: they taste only of suffering.
We owe our highly individualized, special snowflake preferences to the egg’s versatility, which comes directly from its chemical makeup. I’m tempted to call an egg a holy trinity of ingredients—the white, the yolk, and the two intertwined. The white and yolk, protein and fat, are the yin and yang of culinary building blocks. In fact, traditional Chinese medicine literally considers them so. To explore an egg’s versatility, let’s analyze the structure of each part.4
Let’s start with the yolk, essentially a balloon filled with water and fatty spheres, the spheres packed so tightly that they flatten into disks. These microscopic disks reflect light, which is why egg yolks look opaque. Once you pop the yolk, the disks spring back into spheres. Each tiny ball has the structure of a Tootsie Pop: a core of fat surrounded by a crust of protein, cholesterol, and phospholipids. Fat can add richness to a finished dish, of course, but in the kitchen it’s the phospholipids that shine. Molecularly speaking, a phospholipid is a peacemaker. It’s got one end that loves water and another that loves fat and functions like the mutual friend of two enemies. Oil and water don’t mix, but they both shake hands with different ends of the phospholipid molecule. This process, known as emulsification, means egg yolks can fuse watery and oily ingredients into a smooth whole that can turn, say, butter and lemon juice into a hollandaise.5
While the yolk gives fatty flavor and signs peace treaties among opposing molecular camps, the white does a different job. A nearly fatless substance, the white is mostly water but has a dozen different proteins floating in it. These proteins have properties that allow them to foam easily, stabilize foam, become solid when heated, and bind to minerals like iron and copper. Zoom in on the egg white, and you’ll see a lagoon filled with balls of yarn. If you expend energy unraveling those balls—think heat or whisking—the unraveled yarn will start to snarl into a solid tangle. But a protein tangle, like gender, is a spectrum. Egg white proteins can go anywhere from completely untangled (liquid raw egg white) to tightly tangled (say, a crispy-fried egg white) and stop at any texture in between. Tangles can also trap other ingredients like air (meringue), fat (custard), and water (fluffy, American-style scrambled eggs). Milk, cream, sugar, and fat from the yolk or elsewhere work on egg white like conditioner on hair; they get in the way of a tight tangle, which translates to delicate textures. According to McGee, salt and acids “get the proteins together sooner, but don’t let them get as close together.” Salted eggs, for example, start to coagulate at a lower heat but don’t yield as firm a texture.6
Egg cookery presents a paradox. It is the easiest thing in the world—crack an egg into a hot pan, cook, eat—but it is difficult to manipulate with exactness. A true master controls the egg through precise heat, arm power, and additives to create everything from thin crepes to tall souffles. An egg guru is a jazz musician who has mastered the scales in every key and can use them to freestyle a satisfying dish, precisely calibrated to the diner’s taste.
Jacques Pépin is my guru of all things cooking but particularly of eggs. For much of my life, I have enjoyed a parasocial relationship with him. He had a cooking show with his daughter, Claudine, that my father and I used to watch together. We devoured everything he produced, from the best cooking show ever made, Julia and Jacques: Cooking at Home, which we watched first on PBS and then bought on DVD, to his book Complete Techniques, which contains photographed instructions on how to do everything from julienne a carrot to debone a rabbit. I even have copies of some of his old, out-of-print books, including his first one, with Helen McCully, titled The Other Half of the Egg . . . or 180 Ways to Use Up Extra Yolks or Whites. Sunday afternoons with my father often consisted of watching Jacques cook a dish, visiting the grocery store, rewatching parts of the show obsessively, then heading to the kitchen to try to replicate the results using our own spin. While our family shorthand refers to many chefs by last name—Wolfert, Mrs. Chang, Bittman—we always called Jacques by his first name in conversation, a rare distinction, shared only by his counterpart Julia (Child), and of course, Kenji (López-Alt). For me, Jacques—or at least his public persona—is a virtual member of the family. He feels like a second father.
I emailed Pépin at the suggestion of a culinary historian I’d been grilling about “fancy” eggs. Surely Jacques would know some elaborate recipes, he’d told me. Jacques is, after all, widely known for his love of eggs. Did I know Jacques? “Yes, he’s like a second father,” I said. “Oh, so you know him then?” the historian asked. I had to explain that Jacques is my second father in the same way that Lizzo is my inspiration. And that is how I ended up with Jacques’s email address.7
Imagine my delight when I received a prompt reply from Jacques’s assistant to schedule an interview. We put a date on the calendar. I may have spent the next hour yelling to my husband about it. While I was yelling, his assistant emailed me to ask if Jacques and I could chat sooner. “He’s been looking at egg recipes, and I think he’s looking forward to it,” she wrote. I had to lie down on the carpet for a minute, and that was when my phone began to ring. On the other end, a familiar French-accented voice said hello and asked if I could talk right now. Jacques had called me. To talk about eggs. I didn’t have my recording gear set up—I didn’t even have a question list—but I’d been training for this phone call practically from birth. I pinned the phone to my ear (I will never wash that ear again), opened a Word file on my computer, and began typing.
Jacques has forgotten more about eggs than most of us will ever know. This is the man who taught America how to make French omelets and eggs in cocotte (simmered in little dishes). In the United States, we tend to conflate French food with fancy food. One of the things my dad has always loved about Jacques, though, is that he approaches cuisine more like a craftsman than an artist, in other words, without pretension. Like the egg, Jacques is a culinary shapeshifter; he respects the cuisine of privation—think offal—but he can also whip up a mousseline and coat a trout with aspic. To food lovers like me, he is a standard-bearer for French cuisine, with its fancy connotations, but he is also the guy hired to cook industrial quantities of clam chowder for Howard Johnson.8
On the phone he seemed even more energetic than he did on screen, and he was eager to tell me that there are probably three hundred French recipes for eggs, with abundant garnishes, like eggs softly scrambled or cooked in little dishes and garnished with crayfish or sweetbreads. While he was the chef at France’s top political household, he sometimes made deep-fried eggs as a first course for dinner parties. He dropped the eggs in hot oil and massaged them with wooden spoons to maintain their shape, then placed them onto toast rounds and adorned them with bacon. Eggs carry the flavor of truffles so well, he said, and you can garnish them with caviar. At the same time, he added, “There is something very democratic about eggs in some way and very unpretentious.” During this phone call, and my next one with him, it became clear that eggs are so intertwined with his life that he could trace his own biography in them. So I asked him for a self-portrait drawn through three or four egg dishes, dishes that represent who he is and has been as a person and chef over his lifetime.
While my egg biography begins with soft-cooked eggs made with my dad, for Jacques, it is eggs gratin, made by his mother. Born to a restaurateur and a cabinetmaker in Bourg-en-Bresse, near Lyon, in 1935, Jacques grew up amid bomb blasts targeting the strategic train depot in his town. His father decamped to the mountains to be part of the resistance as the Nazis advanced on the city. His mother stayed in town and fed her three young sons on whatever she could find. She kept chickens, so most of their protein came from eggs, which she hard boiled, sliced, set atop some vegetable—usually spinach or chard—and covered with a béchamel sauce, a French white sauce of butter, flour, milk, and a little cheese to make eggs gratin.
So my dad and I tried a version of the gratin from Jacques’s childhood. One of my dad’s love languages is sending me the short instructional videos Jacques posts on Facebook. In one of them, jazz chef that he is, Jacques riffs on this childhood specialty, making it simpler and easier for those of us in a rush. In due course, my dad and I piled some baby spinach into the special egg shirring dishes he gave me for Christmas a few years ago and popped them in the oven. Shirring an egg simply means baking it, and the shirring dishes, while nice, are not necessary; a little baking dish or ramekin would do as well. We cracked eggs atop the wilted spinach and returned them to the oven to film over, then drizzled a tablespoon of cream on top and sprinkled them with parmesan—a lazy béchamel. The spinach, cheese, cream, and oozy yolk of the egg blended in our mouths, unctuous and decadent, but less caloric than it sounds and quite satisfying paired with a slice of toast for lunch.
Later, we watched Jacques make a completely different variation on the theme, an unusual staple of his mother’s that he has named in her honor: eggs Jeanette. It begins with simple hard-cooked eggs, the yolks scooped out and flavored with garlic, parsley, and milk. Next comes the surprising part. Jacques sautés the filled egg halves in oil and sauces them with the reserved yolk mixture, thinned out with a little water, a dash of vinegar, olive oil, and mustard. My dad and I naturally had to try it—for who has fried a deviled egg? This experiment, with its southern France flavors of parsley and garlic, proved delicious. The extra steps, frying and saucing the eggs, made them feel elegant but didn’t add much labor. The egg halves had a slightly crisp, browned surface; the yolks maintained a pillowy texture; and the creamy dressing lightly coated all of it. With a slice of bread and some salad? Heaven. Ever the Renaissance woman, my mother made sure to point out that she had paired our eggs Jeanette with the Christmas carol “Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabelle.”
Eggs Jeanette might have an ancient antecedent. During a deep dive into culinary history, I came across Martino da Como, the Jacques Pépin of fifteenth-century Rome and quite possibly the world’s first celebrity chef. His nickname was “the prince of cooks,” and he worked for the pope’s chamberlain. He left behind one of the era’s few cookbooks, Libro de Arte Coquinaria. It’s got a chapter on eggs, of course, including some entries I found unusual—eggs poached in sweet wine or milk and topped with cheese; eggs threaded onto a spit; and eggs broken directly onto hot coals. His recipe for “stuffed eggs,” though, struck my dad and I as peculiar, so naturally we had to try it. First, we made nonstandard deviled eggs. This filling incorporated raisins pounded to a paste and verjuice, a medieval ingredient that is the sour juice of unripe wine grapes. The recipe also called for aged and fresh cheese (we substituted parmesan and Greek yogurt) as well as “sweet spices,” which after a little internet reconnaissance we translated as cinnamon, cloves, and ground ginger. And of course, a meal fit for a papal chamberlain wouldn’t be complete without some expensive saffron bloomed in milk. As with eggs Jeanette, we stuffed the eggs, fried them, and sauced them, this time with reserved yolk mixture thinned out with verjuice and heated until thick.
The sweet flavor of the raisins went surprisingly well with the salty umami of the parmesan. But the whole thing tasted like mulled cider—pleasant, although it felt emotionally wrong to eat dessert spices in a deviled egg. Wintry mouth party notwith standing, I’d rather have eggs Jeanette.
After World War II ended, and at the tender age of thirteen, Jacques left formal schooling and his mother’s restaurant to become a chef in the old way, through years of hands-on apprenticeship. He began at Le Grand Hôtel de l’Europe as the kid who stoked the wood-burning fires under the stove, working his way up to different prep stations and through the countryside’s fine restaurants, all the way to Le Meurice Hôtel in Paris.
During his time in Paris his draft number came up, and he joined the navy in Algeria. Eventually, someone figured out he could cook and sent him to the Office of the Treasury where he turned out feasts for the top brass. From there, he became personal chef to three heads of state, including Charles de Gaulle. The egg dishes emblematic of this phase in his life, Jacques said, would be poached eggs, or perhaps eggs in aspic, which eventually gave way in Paris to the classic French omelet. I will pen paeans to the French-style omelet in the next chapter, so for now let’s focus on poached eggs, both in and out of aspic.
If you search the web for poached eggs, a jillion methods will reveal themselves. I prefer this one: get your hot water shivering, add some vinegar, and crack in an egg. If you want to be fancy and end up with a nicer shape, use Kenji’s tip: crack the egg or eggs into a sieve first and let the watery part of the white run off before slipping the yolk and tight white into the water. Gently agitate the top of the water a little with a wooden spoon so the egg doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. If you are feeling really fancy, per Jacques, you can also use your spoon to encourage the raw white to move closer to the yolk for a more compact shape. Turn off the heat and wait three-ish minutes. Lift the egg with a slotted spoon, and test that the yolk is gushy but the white is set. Since eggs cook fast, carryover cooking—the tendency of hot food to stay hot and to continue cooking when it’s off the stove—matters. If not spooning directly onto toast for immediate consumption, stop the cooking by shocking the egg in cold water. A fresh egg always poaches best, and you can estimate how fresh your eggs are by finding the three-digit number stamped on your carton, which corresponds to which of the 365 days of the year your egg was packed. Fresh eggs have tight whites that stand taller and fewer of the loose whites that form spindly wisps in the water, but almost any egg is poachable, if you’re not too precious about these things. When the eggs cool, you can clean them up a little with a knife, trimming off those delicate sheets of thin white that spin off them and taste a bit vinegary. I find them delightful, eaten subversively over the bowl of cold water while no one is watching.
What you do with the egg after poaching is up to you. During his apprenticeship, Jacques learned traditional sauces and garnishes for them. For example, you can make eggs Benedict, a dish that dates to the latter half of the nineteenth century (although its exact provenance—New York’s Delmonico’s, the Waldorf, or a financier’s mother—is shrouded in mystery). This classic brunch staple consists of a poached egg placed on a slice of toast topped with ham and hollandaise, a warm sauce made by beating egg yolks with lemon juice and melted butter, and garnished with a slice of truffle. Jacques also learned the old culinary art of aspic. Put the poached egg together with the aspic, and you have ouefs en gelée, an elegant and traditional first course. This dish is a runny poached egg, or mollet egg (between soft and hard boiled, with set white but liquid yolk), suspended in a sparklingly clear aspic and decorated with vegetable trimmings. Jacques may have made it for Charles de Gaulle for the Sunday family meal, though the de Gaulle family was into “relatively simple stuff,” he said. “I know that I did it certainly for the person before de Gaulle, because the person who was there before was crazy about eggs and truffle.” And so I began thinking of this dish as “French President Egg.”9
The beauty of a French President Egg is that it’s fancy and a little fiddly but not particularly difficult. French President Egg uses eggs twice: once in the obvious poached-egg sense and once through the miraculous alchemy that is consommé. My father and I wanted to make the dish in the proper way; we too wanted to eat like we had Jacques cooking for us in Paris. We did the simple part first—we poached some eggs, trimmed them, and set them in the fridge in cold water. The fussier part involved making the aspic, which began with consommé, stock clarified with an egg raft. Our first attempt at consommé failed. I’d tried to cut corners with a pressure cooker stock, and it became cloudy, with fat emulsified into the broth. We ended up with an eggy mess. So we began again. As always, we started with research. Many consommé videos and open cookbooks later, we felt we knew how to do it the very slow and traditional way.
A brown beef stock begins with deeply roasted bones, meat, and veggies, covered with cold water and simmered for half a day. We tended our stock like a newborn baby, stroking it at regular intervals, skimming off the inevitable bone scum and quite a bit of fat. We strained out the solids and began the laborious process of clarification. We took turns pouring it from one pot into another through a cheesecloth-lined sieve to get out as much flotsam as possible. Then we chilled the pan down in a sink of cold water—fast chilling inhibits bacterial growth and eliminates off-flavors—then chucked it on the rear “sun porch,” an icy second freezer in Boston’s frigid December. With ice-cold broth, it is easy to spoon off the solid fat. At the end of this involved process, we had a nearly fatless, mostly clear stock.
If you have never experienced the divine alchemy of clarifying a stock, I recommend trying it at least once. Time collapses in on itself, moves slowly backward and then forward at light speed. This must be how Jesus felt when he turned water into wine; it’s miraculous to watch a dense, disgusting mud yield the purest essence of soup you have ever tasted. Although we’d researched extensively, we decided to use Jacques’s instructions for obvious reasons but also because, as my father put it, “he doesn’t piss around with heat that is too low.” Jacques’s method involves using your hands to mix egg whites, chopped vegetables, and sometimes ground meat in a pot, then adding lukewarm stock. As the mixture is heated, the egg white traps particles and carries them to the top where it forms a solid disk known as “the raft.” As Jacques explained, the egg white removes some flavor along with the flotsam, so chefs include veggies and meat in the process to return some of it. We poured our lukewarm stock into the icky, eggy slurry and popped the whole thing over brisk heat until it started to bubble. The raft began to form, exactly as Jacques said it would. At first, our formerly clear stock resembled primordial ooze—unappetizing muddy water with chunks of egg-caked veggies and gray wisps of flotsam. Eventually, a disgusting grey-brown scum began to rise and solidify. We stopped stirring, turned the heat to low, and prayed for a miracle. Low heat prevents a strong boil from breaking the raft apart and reintegrating into the stock. Soon enough, the whole thing coagulated into a thick pancake of despair. We let it simmer for the prescribed time.
And then, pure alchemy. We broke the disk with a ladle and spooned the stock into a cheesecloth-lined strainer. The result stunned us, a stock, now a consommé so clear, my mother said, “you could read a newspaper through it.” The recipes all said it would sparkle, and I figured this for poetic exaggeration. But it did sparkle—sunlight reflected off the bottoms of our spoons. We made fairy soup, the essence of soup, what Jacques calls the “ultimate” in his video. It tasted of the raft’s bright vegetables against a meaty backdrop.
With the hard work done, we moved to assembly. We added unflavored gelatin to the consommé to help set it up, then poured thin sheets into the bottom of my wedding teacups, which have a nice shape, and chilled them until set. We blanched veggie trimmings to help them keep their color—leek shreds, minuscule carrot wedges, and parsley leaves for decoration. Night had fallen, and my mother and husband joined us in the kitchen. We took the trimmings, lamenting our lack of culinary tweezers, and formed tiny flowerscapes in the teacups. My dad and husband each did one or two, but my mom really got into it, taking her time, rendering several beautiful botanic landscapes that combined both her love of green things—as she once told me, while buying a flat of plants, “To love plants so much is a terrible sickness”—as well as her fascination with cute decorative stuff, which I share. We placed our cold eggs on the designs, topped up the teacups with the gelatinized consommé, and slid them into the fridge to firm up for New Year’s Eve dinner, an extravaganza that would feature a complex omelet (an omelet Arnold Bennett of smoked haddock, hollandaise, and cheese) in addition to this eggy first course.
A few hours later, after we’d fed my son—he lapped up a bowl of that gorgeous consommé—and put him to bed, we pulled the teacups out of the fridge and, after a quick dip in hot water, inverted the eggs onto toasts. They were the most beautiful thing I have ever eaten—they looked like antique paper weights of brown-tinted glass, the egg a pale background for the flowers frozen inside. They also tasted like nothing I have ever eaten. The liquid yolks encased the slippery meat jelly, the two delicate textures and flavors coming together in mouth-coating umami. After a few bites, though, our plates looked a mess; the paperweights rapidly disintegrated. Perhaps we should have used more gelatin, my father said, they might have held together better. The only other way to improve them, he added, was a set of dedicated aspic molds. Did I need a set of aspic molds? I could see my husband begin to stiffen up. I’ll get you a set of aspic molds, my dad said, if it doesn’t ruin your marriage.
Two weeks later a set of four arrived in the mail.
I’ve made French President Eggs a few times since with the consommé left in my freezer, for friends I knew would be game and appreciative. I made them for myself too, a light little lunch on toast with a salad. But the labor of consommé deterred me. Jacques told me that his wife adored this dish and that they’d eat it five or ten times every summer. He also confessed, “In the summer, I don’t even clarify the stock if I have a good chicken stock.” (After I told my dad what Jacques said, he bought his own set of aspic molds and started cheating with store-bought consommé from a can, which he claims is almost as delicious.)
Part of the reason I love French food in general and Jacques’s cookery in particular has to do with my mother’s tastes. After radiation damaged her salivary glands, she’s been unable to eat anything too salty, spicy, or acidic—she used to find orange juice too much for her palate—but many French flavors are safe for her. My devotion also has to do with broader cultural trends. Today’s tastes, Kenji told me, have “a lot to do with our association with French haute cuisine—our association with fancy food being French or European, so I don’t know, it might change with the times but it’s hard to dissociate from the time.” He also pointed out that in fine dining “we tend to associate delicate flavors with fancier better food—it’s a cultural imperialism thing.” French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu might agree. In his influential book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, he makes the case that our aesthetic choices—everything from what we eat to what we read and wear—says something about our social class. For example, fancy East Coast elites eat arugula while “real Americans” have juicy burgers and domestic beer.10
But in themselves, eggs don’t carry class associations. As Jacques told me, they are “probably one of the most democratic foods because even in a small country where people have no money there tend to be a couple of chickens running around.” The food historians I interviewed agreed. Yale professor Paul Freedman, author of American Cuisine and How It Got This Way, told me they are “one of the few foods that everybody eats,” while Ken Albala, author of Three World Cuisines: Italian, Mexican, Chinese and professor at the University of the Pacific, explained that eggs are “among very few foods that don’t have any class associations at all.” A full English or Scottish breakfast—a huge spread that includes fried eggs—has working-class connotations, he said. Meanwhile, King Louis XIV of France had a crier proclaim, “The King is about to eat his egg,” as a crowd gathered to watch him lop the top of his soft-boiled specimen. People of all classes eat eggs, and whether they are plain or fancy lies in the treatment and cultural context. Jacques’s mother hard-boiled them in war time and covered them in a simple cheese sauce—rustic for him, but the use of the word béchamel in the United States adds a touch of foreign elegance.11
It all makes me wonder: do my father and I love French egg recipes for themselves? And to what extent is our taste the product of my upwardly mobile dad’s childhood during the height of French-food mania in the United States? Does any of this matter if we enjoy the process and the meal? The only thing I know for sure is that making and eating French President Eggs is a unique experience to share with friends and loved ones, a little novelty, an aesthetic jolt to the eyes and tongue. And for me, that’s enough.