Cooking an egg without laying one

Okay, a bad pun.

One of the puzzles I've come across is how many expressions there are for cooking a deuce of eggs. We may bake (shirred eggs are just eggs covered with cream and baked in a ramekin), boil (hard or soft), coddle, fry (sunny-side up or over easy), poach, or scramble them, or maybe just make an omelet or a souffle or a frittata or even a tortilla (the Spanish item, not the Mexican), and we could even devil them. I really think we should also talk about just steaming them, since true poached eggs are immersed fully in water while the items I see available for poaching an egg, especially in a microwave, often have a container above the water with steam doing the work.

Not all these expressions will make sense to a Denny's waitress. "I'd like my eggs coddled, please" sounds like the cook is being asked to talk nice to them before cracking them open. However, it's fun to experiment at home and see what variations are possible with the way an egg can be treated.

I have a couple of favorites. One is an omelet made more or less by folding the eggs together as they cook rather than just stirring them as you would when you scramble them, and the other is a nicely poached egg on a piece of buttered toast.

In the film Julie and Julia there is a bit about poaching an egg by dropping it in a pot of boiling water and getting the white to stay with the yolk rather than scattering away. It does not work too well for Meryll Streep and too often not for the rest of us. My friend Tom suggests the solution is to let the egg cook for a brief period in the water (15 seconds, say) before cracking it open. I find another answer in Harold McGee's authoritative On Food and Cooking. This is to have a large pot in which there is a half tablespoon of salt and a full tablespoon of vinegar for each quart of water. The eggs will disappear and pop up again in three minutes owing to a chemical reaction explained in his book. One point is that a number of eggs can be prepared in the same pot at different times and each will surface when it's ready.

Ever since discovering the Spanish tortilla, I'll occasionally make this for dinner. I take some small potatoes that are already boiled, then dice them and fry in olive oil with diced onion and perhaps some sliced bell peppers or other interesting ingredients, mix in the beaten eggs, and fry again. Sliced in very small sections you have a nice item for tapas if you want this just for an appetizer.

I still have to experiment with using ramekins and trying various ideas for baking an egg. I may find some new favorites to write about later.