Egg Cups

This image is from the website eHow Mom: How to make egg cups http://www.ehow.com/how_8030726_make-egg-cups.html Breakfast this morning was a piece of toast and a boiled egg, a little pullet pellet of protein. Have I mentioned that I finally realized why people ate boiled eggs in little egg cups, scraping the egg out of the shell with a spoon? Never could understand how that method arose. Why not shell the darn egg and eat it? It finally came to me: The eggs were fresh, perhaps laid that morning in the family chicken coop (or “slave quarters” as I once heard a back-to-the-land hippie describe his chicken coop back in the 70s) out back of the house. A fresh egg clings to its shell, not like the warehoused eggs we buy at the supermarket now. When we, through some fluke of merchandising, get a fresh egg and boil it, we curse it as we try to free it from its shell, losing chunks of our breakfast in the effort. An old egg is easier to peel when it’s boiled. The membrane between shell and egg separates easily and we get what we think of as a proper boiled egg, a smooth shining white oval, ready to be salted or buttered or chopped into salad and consumed. A fresh egg – well, you might as well stand it up in a holder, crack off the end, and scoop out the contents with a spoon. And so was born a whole line of dining crockery. That’s the trouble with coming in to the movie late, my friends. You have to figure out the plot backwards. Egg cups.