looking for the joy #2 - boiled eggs and soldiers
November 21st, 2008
The search continues. Boiled eggs and soldiers is a very old pleasure. When I was small the soldiers were made from soft white bread and very thickly buttered. These days I prefer toast and am a little less generous with the butter. I’m also a little more sophisticated and have some freshly ground pepper on the runny yoke instead of the salt I used to add. I put the eggs in a pot of boiling water and leave them there for exactly five minutes (which is just about the time it takes to make and butter the toast). ..
November 21st, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Yummy, now that is some joyous food. I love the color drawing! Hope you ate the eggs before they got cold.
November 21st, 2008 at 10:46 pm
mmmm - looks delicious xx
November 22nd, 2008 at 1:01 pm
that’s an excellent sketch - one for the next beany i reckon!
November 22nd, 2008 at 3:02 pm
If the yolks were not runny enough, my mum used to add a small knob of butter, mixing it in, as it melted, with the blade of a table knife. Saturated fats and cholesterol were not in our vocabularies back then.
As kids playing outside the terraced houses which flanked the cobbled back streets of the Lancashire town of Preston, as a treat we were often given an egg cup full of white sugar, in which to dip thin sticks of raw rhubarb. Then there were the mashed banana and sugar sandwiches, on white bread, or, worse still it seems now, but then quite delicious, treacle sandwiches, or even condensed milk ones. Perhaps it was the end of the wartime sugar rationing which was responsible for this strange diet.
November 22nd, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Michael, you just reminded me of a simple childhood pleasure! My mom used to cut “soldiers” like that for my eggs…
November 22nd, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Hey, Michael, for the benefit of the girl from California, can you explain how to make soldiers?
I had a boyfriend once who was an ex-marine, but that’s obviously not what you’re talking about.
November 22nd, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Hello Kay. Soldiers are made from toasted and buttered bread cut into strips thin enough to dunk in a boiled egg. There’s a sophisticated TV cook over here who dunks asparagus spears in her eggs. I’ve never tried that. I like soldiers.
November 22nd, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Thanks, I’ll have to try that. Toast, not asparagus.
December 6th, 2008 at 8:11 am
[...] am trying though. Small pleasures are definitely reasserting themselves. Boiled eggs and soldiers. Coffee in MY Favourite Cafe. Working on a new issue of The Beany. Twittering (please do follow [...]
December 6th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Hmmm! That IS a pleasure!!! - Best best best start to the day ever. I try and toast them so much that they’ll put up with a six minute egg. Last time I had weird magic bread that stayed soft even when toasted brown. Worst start to day ever. Shall re-try in a minute actually, for lunch, bit wrong but now I started thinking about it I must.
December 6th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Also suddenly remembered - when I had a very sad year my all-is-ok food was melted Camenbert with gherkins. I think dipping food into food is somehow good for the soul. Also you get to prepare two things and make them work together to make a new brilliant thing, which is incredibly reassuring somehow…
December 19th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
[...] something I’ve been doing a lot of recently. There’s my current favourite breakfast of boiled eggs of course, and now my current favourite pudding of [...]