Brunch blogging: one of the best food perks I’ve discovered living where I do is that you can get some of the best eggs I’ve ever had. Maybe not quite as good as when I was in China as a young boy and was shown how to reach into the chicken coop and pick up eggs from right underneath the hens, but still, damn fine specimens far better than anything I could get while living in New York, incredibly fresh, radiant orange yolk, proteins still firm not runny, good solid shells, tasty as hell. This is a 6-egg frittata with potatoes and yellow squash, finished under the broiler with a crust of bread crumbs and parmesan, with a side of freshly-harvested arugula softened with olive oil and smoked turkey sausage.
This takes me back to the summer I spent living in a a grand-uncle’s farm in the probinsiya. The eggs were such a revalation. I was used to smooth, white commercial eggs, so grand-uncle’s speckled eggs seemed tiny, with disproportionately large, deep orange yolks. I had never tasted anything like them! I ate those eggs all summer. Hard boiled. Scrambled. Soft boiled. Torta. Sunny side with yolks super over easy on a bed of pandanrice.
Grand-uncle passed away when I was in my twenties. His children sold the farm to a firm that consolidated small pieces of land together and implemented efficiency measures to increase the yield. My distant cousins who remained on the farm continued to send us sacks of rice and baskets of eggs as gifts. But the chickens now receive supplements, so the eggs were never the same. They were larger, all egg whites with pale yolks. Much less tasty too.
Exactly. The chickens in China are scrawny compared to plumped up North American specimens, and the eggs are small, speckled, bumpy, with very hard shells. The flavor can’t be replicated. Same with ducks and duck eggs. My favorite as a kid was salted eggs (i.e. preserved) with rice porridge.
Sorry to hear about what happened to your grand-uncle’s farm. But at least you got to enjoy it in its heyday! Those kinds of experiences never fade away.