5 Toasts!
Thought I'd get an easy one out of the way. For those of you wondering, this wasn't an actual dinnertime meal - we didn't, say, hunker down in some corner in and devour our respective hard boiled eggs whilst communicating with a series of grunts and gestures. That's not how we roll. I had a couple for breakfast (like a civilized person), smushed up with generous dollops of mayo and spread onto a couple of old pieces of bread.
The thesis the book presents is that most of the time the egg spends in the pot should not be spent in boiling water as I had previously believed, but instead in water that is merely cooling down from a simmer. The stove isn't even on for most of the cooking process! "This is just the kind of lunacy that might work," I thought, and tried it out. The eggs were, as promised, not too hard (and the yolks therefore not caked with that blackish sludge we have all come to accept as an unfortunate but unavoidable part of the egg experience), and not too soft (too-soft eggs characterized by their nightmarishly nasty wet yolks).
When I presented the eggs to Martha (see picture) she said she couldn't have made them better herself. The book, she told me, just sort of outlines the theory of perfect hard boiled eggs. While she could grasp the concept, she (and many before her) always had trouble in the actual execution of her theories. Legend, she said, told of a 'chosen one' who would be able to make hard boiled eggs of such perfection that generations afterwards would tell his tale. She then looked at me with her sober, wax-like gaze and said "You are that person." So there you have it.
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