Everyday Madness - Breakfast Variety

From Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban

My husband gets up each morning and eats breakfast. He starts with some muesli and kefir and then he has two poached eggs with toast. Occasionally, he will splash out and have some bacon as well.

Every morning he asks if I would like him to poach me some eggs as well.

Like many other females of my age, I was brought up by women who regarded thinness as the apex of achievement for those of our sex. As a result, my response to my husband is never immediate and rarely in the affirmative. The truth is, my reflex on hearing his kind offer is to wonder if I should perhaps skip breakfast - and maybe lunch too; or possibly even go all the way and eat nothing for the entire week.

This is neurotic, of course - completely nutty in fact. I know that. Sadly though, the recognition of the irrationality of a thought pattern is not always enough to make it possible to banish it. The matriarchs of my childhood stare down on me, examining my ageing form with expressions of distaste, a congregation of judgment in my mind. Each of them subscribes to the "you can never be too thin" element of Jacqueline Kennedy's famous, possibly apocryphal, remark.

But, leaving aside all this tedious psychological baggage, there is also the problem of eggs themselves. I can never decide if I actually like them.

From Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban

Well, that's not quite true. I do know that I do not like egg white. That is absolutely indisputable - I hate its taste and its slimy texture (and the concept of an "egg white omelette" is truly revolting to me".

Therefore, on those occasions when I do accept my husband's offer of poached eggs, he knows to always supply me with a teaspoon with which to eat them. He is familiar with my peculiar habits and doesn’t show any surprise as I peel off the white, which, so far as I am concerned is merely the yolk’s wrapper. Setting it aside, I plunge my spoon into the rich yellow yolk the white contains.

Yes, for me, the yolk is the egg. The white is rubbish. The yolk is the prize at the centre of a mess of packaging that goes by the label "the white".

And yet the yolk always turns out to be enigmatic. While I absolutely never, ever dislike egg yolk, I cannot work out what the exact quality of egg yolk is that I enjoy.

I definitely love yolk's texture. The word 'unctuous' seems to me to have been created to describe it. I love yolk's colour too. But the thing I cannot decide about is whether yolk has a distinct flavour. Without salt, it seems it almost doesn't. With salt, whatever flavour it does have is very nearly overwhelmed.

So, on those mornings when I do accept my husband's kind offer, my reason for doing so is simple: I want to make another attempt to define for myself the taste of egg yolk.

I am almost sure the quest is doomed, but from time to time hope rises again that I will get to the bottom of the problem. Perhaps the difficulty is that one cannot bite into a yolk, I decide, wondering whether if I try again with toast as yolk’s accompaniment, I will finally be able to say what the taste of yolk actually is.

But, whatever I try - toast, asparagus, muffin - yolk somehow effaces its own flavour behind the thing I've matched it with. I sense its richness - almost buttery, almost creamy - but the flavour itself continues to elude me.

Never mind. As Margaret Mitchell wrote and Vivien Leigh declared, "Tomorrow is another day".