Going to work on an egg

Some short time before he died I asked my father what the family diet was like when he was growing up. His family was large; he was a twin and with his brother, the last of nine children, they were reared on a farm of nine acres. That was one acre per child, a stocking rate that would be unacceptably high, even for livestock, in those days. My father told me that he did not really remember well but he added, ‘there seemed to be a lot of eggs’. To this day, eggs are associated in the African mind, with the food needs of the white man because of the dietary preferences of the missionary priests who first went there from Ireland.

The diet of most people who lived in the countryside included a plentiful supply of eggs until recent health fads and food scares relegated the egg to one or two a week at most. The huge variety of foods that we now have at hand was simply not available to people until about twenty years ago. The unavailability of foods that we now take for granted was matched by their unaffordability in many cases. ‘Fast food’ came in the form of yet another egg, boiled for the mandatory three minutes or fried in an equally short period. An egg was recommended at breakfast-time with the toast and the evening meal or ‘tea’ often revolved around another egg and more bread. Rice was eaten only as a dessert, boiled in milk or milled into powder and given to children or invalids as ‘ground rice’. Spaghetti was a genre of Western films and wine was what the priest put in the chalice.

The principle of self-sufficiency meant that people ate what they produced or what was available locally. There were exceptions like tea-leaves and sugar that had to be imported but most of what ended up on the family table did not travel far from source. The diet was limited, especially in fruit, giving rise to the phenomenon of boils and styes and carbuncles on the face and head. What it lacked in variety of product, it made up for in the ingenuity with which the same foods were presented on the plate or pan.

Eggs could easily become pancakes or pastry. They could be poached, boiled, fried, scrambled or tossed into a mug of hot milk and whisked into an egg-nog as a treat. Our speciality at home was imprisoning a raw egg inside a dollop of steaming hot potato or ‘champ’ until it cooked and then whipping it all into what was commonly called a ‘right prawkas’. Eggs were considered to be ‘nourishing’, which is the quality that people looked for in their food. I once sat beside an old man at a wedding who looked disdainfully at the chunk of half-raw melon that he was presented with. He prodded it, tasted it, seasoned it with some pepper and salt, moved it around the plate and eventually abandoned it. He asked me what it was called and I told him. “There’s not much nourishment in that”, he commented disgustedly.

Mother Teresa was once said to have been on American television for interview when she viewed one of the advertisements during their so-intrusive ad-breaks. She remarked on the irony of bread being advertised which boasted that it was not fattening or nourishing. Most of the world looks to bread, she noted, for the very qualities that the American market was boasting about as being absent from their product. Bread that does not nourish seemed to her as yet another Western madness.

‘Teaching your granny to suck eggs’ was a futile occupation indulged in by those who thought they knew better. Grannies were commonly thought to be experts in egg-production and consumption. Cracking a raw egg on your front teeth and allowing it to slide down the swallow-hole was not exactly haute-cuisine or good manners but it was thought to be a remedy for all kinds of weakness and loss of appetite; self-induced or otherwise. One old-time toper who used to frequent our pub had a more sophisticated version of this ‘cure’ that he grandly called a ‘Bombay Oyster’. His recipe was a raw egg covered over with sherry and consumed in one swallow. This combined the traditional ‘hair-of-the-dog’ cure with some semi-solid nourishment and a sense of sophisticated bravado to help steady up his shaky equilibrium.

Eggs came in a variety of shapes, sizes and tastes. There was the occasional surprise of twin embryos in a double-yoked egg. A shell-less egg occasionally turned up, prompting the addition of some extra ‘grit’ in the diet of the hens. We occasionally ate pigeon eggs, pilfered from the wild and pullets’ eggs when the domesticated young hens started to lay. We graduated on to duck-eggs when our stomachs had become accustomed to strong flavours. The green duck-eggs were the stronger flavoured as became their darker shell. Brown hen-eggs were somehow favoured over white ones. This often led to the deception of boiling a white-shelled egg in tea-leaves for the usual time that it took the egg to cook. The stain from the tea-leaves would by then have changed the shell-colour to a convincing brown.

Omelettes were yet to come as our society became more travelled, more sophisticated in diet and more Europeanised. Quiche was, we were told, ‘only for wimps’ when it first came on the diet scene and as for salad… ‘Mayo, God help us’ was still a county in the west from which most people emigrated, rather than the egg-based dressing that goes with everything nowadays. We’ve come a long way from bacon and egg breakfasts and the tea-time boiled egg with salt and butter. The current talk of world food shortages and rising prices might send us back to our staples of the past and the humble egg will certainly be there, on and in the menu.