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Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Good Eggs: My Love Affair with the Tortilla

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…)

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