I am a lover of the humble egg. Look at it: perfection made egg.
Like fluffy clouds topped with smiley suns!
They're a hugely versatile ingredient and I consume them daily with no discernible issues, a standard waistline and normal levels of cholesterol. But a few conversations have given me pause for thought. The first, simply, that they contain too much cholesterol to consume daily - is this true?
Second, and more mysteriously, as a sometime ex-pat I've met a lot of people from a lot of places, and a number of Americans, in particular, seem to have a fear of runny yolks; one bordering on horror. There's a dish of which I am fond which is served in a insanely-hot stone bowl with a raw egg left to fry on the top of the food. I recall being asked, by two separate Americans, whether I was
seriously going to eat it (whilst I was in the process of cheerily mixing in the runny mixture). I know there's the whole salmonella risk, but having grown up eating eggs straight from our chickens to the frying pan, I've never really taken this seriously, and I've not had any associated hospital visits over the decades... I also reasoned that people have been eating eggs for
rather a long time, and they've never featured highly on my personal list of risk.
Has there been a big public-health warning stateside, or something? Oddly, something has always distracted me from asking intelligent follow-up questions, but a couple of years back one girl I know actually refused her dinner on the grounds that the egg was insufficiently cooked and, hence, dangerous.
To me a hard yolk is always a disappointment; a reminder of the gooey-ness that could have been...