Let's talk eggs for a minute or two. Just to cleanse our palate of all the bad eggs on the news, shall we?
When I was a kid, I had a
love/hate relationship with eggs. I loved eggs, but not everyone understood the
delicate nature of the product. Eggs are versatile in that they’ll let you cook
them in variety of ways, temperatures, and mixed with herbs, meats and
vegetables of all kinds. But a bad cook can ruin eggs so easily…
So to my literal mind a
“bad egg” was not necessarily a morally deficient person but what happened when
a bad cook got hold of an egg.
The word tortilla (omelet) carried the promise of
adventure because the eggs could be enveloping any number of delicious
ingredients; and sometimes they cleverly hid the surprise under a cover of
golden richness. But not always.
I had a cousin who drenched
everything he ate in ketchup. He did not taste his food. His go-to move was to
slather enough ketchup to hide the original offense and then a little more so
that the only aftertaste would be whatever Heinz intended it to be.
I have no recollection why I spent the night at their house, though I suspect it may have been at the heels of the Hooker Incident--a story for another blog--and that morning the matriarch in that particular house (being very careful not to “out” her) cooked us breakfast. "I'll make you eggs," she announced. And I got excited at the prospect. But Cousin was circumspect, at best. He took out the ketchup and pointed to it. “You’ll need this,” he said and winked at me. I shook my judgy little head, because although not of school age yet, I knew his culinary crime to be immense.
First, she threw a big soup
spoon full of margarine on a small frying pan and then the eggs. She shook a dash of salt into the pan and put on the flame as high as it would go--explaining the presence of a couple of fire extinguishers in the room. I think it may have been intended to be sunny side up until she broke a couple of yolks
and we ended up with the inevitably scrambled
eggs, or so I was led to believe by my cousin. (Intending to add onions to it but not doing so because they made you cry
does not count! But also, I believe she tried to cut an onion one time and then tried to dry a tear and knocked the glasses off her face with the knife. She didn't cook again for weeks.) And while she referred to that abomination she served as a “tortilla”; she
didn’t put anything on the eggs, so technically it wasn’t an omelet. It was just
plain scrambled eggs.
I mean, really: she didn't even roll it up pretty on the plate. Come on!
Well, plain, overcooked,
slightly burned scrambled eggs with the consistency of soft rubber with one salty spot. But
at least the margarine made it all slippery and, thus, easier to swallow. The ketchup
hid its imperfections, and added sweet and tangy to something that did not need
that type of complexity. Frankly, what that dish needed was a garbage bin and a
Requiem Mass so we could, all involved, ask the Lord’s forgiveness for what was
done to those poor, defenseless eggs.
That morning, for the first
time in my life, I ate toast for breakfast and begged the Universe to reunite
me with a good cook soon! I have not prayed much in this lifetime, but when I do, I am a pragmatist.
There is a distinctly
Puerto Rican omelet with onions and Vienna sausages that remains a favorite comfort food
to this day. One of my first adventures in the kitchen was making cheese omelets. And once I set out on my own, I freestyled with herbs and vegetables, diced ham and tiny shrimp, and then I set to learn the breakfast secrets of my neighbors in Brooklyn.
Certainly, anyone who has found
themselves in financial straits knows that eggs-for-dinner is one of the best
things to come out of peasant cuisine from around the world! It is also handy to know a
few egg dishes when you work long and strange hours and have no desire to spend
your free time standing over a hot stove.
One of the things I
perfected was taking the simple tortilla
de papatas (the world famous Spanish potato omelet) and tweaking it into a meal. I use
leftover Spanish potatoes—potato slices cooked with sautéed onions and garlic from
an old recipe from some monastery, if I remember correctly. It's really a bastardization of a Cuban omelet.
I remember checking off
this photo grid of popular tortillas served in Madrid and pairing them to
different wines during our brunch days. Each tortilla had
its own personality, some more robust than others, some more fragrant, others
delicate and others just badass!
There are places in Spain (from small delis to bars) that serve nothing but omelets (swoon!)
The most memorable
entries included tortilla de mariscos
(with seafood, including mussels, shrimp, and cuttlefish), tortilla de sardinas (with sardine filets laid over the eggs as
they cook), tortilla de atún (with
either fresh or canned tuna), tortilla de
hígado de pollo (with coarsely chopped chicken livers), and tortilla catalana (made with a spicy
Butifarra sausage and cannellini beans).
Whether you chose to have your omelet with a salad, with pan y tomate (brushing
off a tomato’s juices over slices of bread), under gravy or over a grain or
pasta, all of these Spanish omelets are delicious. And for the flexitarians
options run from wild mushrooms, to asparagus, spinach and garlic, roasted
tubers, and mixed herbs; and depending on your rules about dairy, an
international array of melty cheeses to enchant the palate.
Of course, every culture has
its own version of an omelet
and you can open your horizons by cooking beyond borders.
(more to come…)
