Who was it who first found pleasure in rolling an egg — so fragile, so ready to shatter — down a hill? The pastime appears in “The Encyclopedia of Traditional British Rural Sports,” alongside deer stalking and falconry, and goes back centuries. The pagans did it, historians tell us, in spring to celebrate the land’s rebirth after winter, and then the Christians, who saw in the egg a symbol for the stone rolled away from the tomb.
Recipe: Chawanmushi
Still they roll. In Washington every Monday after Easter, a horde of children descends on the White House, armed with long-handled spoons to send eggs — reportedly 30,000 this year — tumbling across the lawn. It is a national ritual, occasionally suspended in times of bad weather, war, scarcity and pandemic, that officially dates to 1878, when aspiring young egg-rollers, barred from the Capitol after a particularly raucous rampage, lobbied President Rutherford B. Hayes for use of his backyard.
A spoilsport might point out that as of last month, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average price of eggs hovered around $6.23 per dozen — close to 52 cents apiece. This humble staple, long taken for granted, is suddenly a luxury. (If it’s any comfort, in mid-19th-century gold-rush San Francisco, the population grew so quickly that local chickens couldn’t keep up, and a single egg sometimes sold for as much as a dollar, the equivalent of $41 today.)
In truth, it has always been luxurious, the fatty yolk like a ripe sun, the protein-rich white. We just took this bounty for granted. An egg has superpowers, uniting otherwise-hostile ingredients and giving chiffon cakes and soufflés their angel weight. But it is also almost a complete meal in itself, with its cache of essential amino acids, kept safe inside the armor of that mystifyingly perfect, symmetrical shell.
Look how little the egg requires of us in the kitchen: Cracked over a hot skillet, it trembles, then commits, going from liquid to solid in a moment. “All you do is heat and eat,” a woman sings in a 1978 commercial for “the incredible edible egg.” If frying seems too ordinary a fate for such an expensive ingredient now, it doesn’t take much to treat it with more reverence. In Japan, the trick is steam, which gently transforms eggs into the elegant, semi-ethereal half-custard half-flan called chawanmushi, named after the tea bowl (chawan) in which it was traditionally cooked and presented.
This is not dinner but is instead meant to be one of a number of small dishes and tastes, as in kaiseki, the rarefied classical Japanese meal. At Den in Tokyo, the chef, Zaiyu Hasegawa, offers a modern kaiseki with touches of whimsy (a foie gras cookie in a convenience-store wrapper, immaculately fried chicken stuffed with crab). There, chawanmushi comes with every meal, a pause between heftier bites, creamy but delicate.
First the eggs are beaten — just half an egg per person — with dashi, a stock of kombu (kelp) and katsuobushi (bonito flakes). This brings a mellow brine but also, unexpectedly, a tinge of smoke from the katsuoboshi-making process, in which the bonito, a dark, tender fish that roams from the shallows to the deeps and grows meaty feeding on anchovies and sardines, is submerged in hot water just below boiling, then freed of its bones and smoked for days before being shaved into papery curls.
The eggs and dashi, now one, are run through a sieve, for smoothness, then seasoned with usukuchi, a soy sauce that is lighter in color and body than dark soy sauce but slightly saltier, with a tart finish. Pour the mixture into teacups or ramekins, and be patient while it steams. Some recipes call for a ratio of as much as three times liquid to egg, but Hasegawa uses less here, so what you taste foremost is egg, the most lavish ingredient.
Does it need more? You might layer mushrooms, ginkgo nuts or tiny shrimp at the bottom. Here Hasegawa suggests a purée of celery root melted down with butter, earthy-sweet. Spoon it on top once the custard has set. With the first bite, the faint chewiness of the celery root gives way to silk and surrender. Take your time. Think of the hens. Make every spoonful count.
The post The Most Luxurious Use of Eggs, by Way of Japan appeared first on New York Times.
