As long ago as the 18th century, a cookery treatise said some very far-sighted things about eggs: ‘They divide themselves between the healthy and the sick, the poor and the rich.’ Besides being a soft and agreeable food, like few others, eggs are the height of versatility, as they go with everything, precisely because of their aromatic neutrality and smoothness. One of the most amusing travel books ever (Gathering from Spain), written by Richard Ford and published at the end of the 19th century, refers to Hispanic cookery, saying: ‘fried eggs are at all times the most humble culinary resource’.
But eggs in their various forms have not always been associated with purely rural, simple, or home cooking. In the recipes of Aragonese Teodoro Bardají (the so-called Hispanic Escoffier) there are innumerable recipes using eggs, which, excluding tortillas, number exactly forty-nine recipes! Some as curious as Eggs a la Bella Otero, The Rainbow, The Muscovite, or Eggs Fru-Fru, some served cold and with various jellies. This culinary author has been more sparing in his use of eggs as a main ingredient, but no less brilliant.
I have always given great importance to eggs in my cooking. And there is always a dish representing this on our menu. But I have worried constantly about poached eggs because – despite it being a marvel of smoothness not to break the runny yolks – dropping them in water with vinegar and salt, loses much of their property and flavour. So a few years ago, we developed a simple plastic device, where you could introduce the whole egg with aromatic and fatty additions, in this case black truffle and ‘tartufo’ oil, in such a way that you could poach the egg without it coming into contact with water. It is the base of a dish that has been successful for many years, ‘Egg and Truffle Flower in Goose Fat with Txistorra of Dates’. Take some bread and... dunk it in. The magnificence of simplicity. So perhaps you don’t need to wrack your brains about eggs but just follow the wise advice of the Andalusian proverb: ‘Eat an egg one hour old, bread of the same day, wine a year old and chicken a little less than a year.’ And, apart from the wine, I fully agree with these words.