Sept. 2: The nuances of boiled eggs

The difference between a hardboiled egg and a softboiled egg is about one minute.

Cooking websites tell me that if I want a softboiled egg, I should boil it for eight minutes (no more, no less.) Hardboiled eggs can stay in the water for a minute longer. Hardboiled eggs are also known as eggs that are inedible. No one should eat hardboiled eggs except for Lieutenant Columbo.

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The adjective ‘hardboiled’ can only modify two nouns. One of them is “eggs.” The other is “detective fiction.” Nothing else can be hardboiled. You can’t have hardboiled playing cards, dining room suites, ear wax, Bangles CDs, or mummified remains. It just doesn’t work.

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Here is a book of hardboiled private eye stories that I bought from my friend, Charles Prepolec, back in the early 90s.

 

 

When I bought the book from him, I complained that there were no Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer stories in there. Mr. Prepolec told me that I should expand my horizons and read P.I. stories from the real masters like Chandler and Hammett.

Almost every story in that collection was told in the first person point of view. The only one told in third person was a story called Surf, whose protagonist was a gay insurance investigator named Dave Brandstetter. This taught me that gay private eyes cannot tell their stories in the first person POV.

Bill Pronzini, who edited the anthology, pointed out that the heroes of the stories didn’t necessarily fall into the hardboiled Mike Hammer prototype, which is to say womanizing tough guys who beat up punks in alleyways. In addition to Brandstetter, there was a PI named Matt Scudder, who was an alcoholic ex-cop, there was a “one-armed intellectual” named Dan Fortune, and there were also two female detectives – Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone and Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone (Marcia Muller was married to Pronzini) – to balance things out.

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I just can’t eat hardboiled eggs. I have tried. Can’t do it. I have no quarrel with the people who can, though I am gripped with temporary nausea whenever I wander into a bar and see a jar of pickled eggs on the counter.

Now why would bars serve pickled eggs? If a person has been drinking, pickled eggs are the last thing they should be eating. That’s because eggs like to make people barf. Eggs appear in barf like Muppets appear on Sesame Street.

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At this point, I should probably mention that I am an anomaly among egg purchasers. Most of the eggs I buy are deliberately wasted by me. That is not to say the eggs don’t serve a purpose; they do. It is just that the egg is not eaten. Instead, the egg amazes.

Let me explain.

I am a magician. (Eric Jodouin, who gave me the title for this note, is also a magician, so he will sympathise with what I am about to say.) I do a magic trick that is classically known as silk to egg.* The plot is that the magician takes a silk (usually red) sticks it in his hand, and then turns the silk into an egg. The audience can usually figure it out – the egg is a hollowed out egg and the magician has simply stuffed the red silk into the hole of the egg. The magician cops to this and offers to repeat the trick, but this time, at the end, the egg is a real egg, which the magician proves by breaking into a glass.**

This seems like an opportune time to point out that, in my quest to make amazing magic tricks, I have gone on some truly bizarre scavenger hunts. I have ordered special fishing wire from Germany, hunted down 90% ethyl alcohol from pharmacies, and dug through odds and ends bins in old hardware stores looking for the perfect sized lugnut. All I was doing was following the instructions from various magic trick manuals. All I was doing was trying to make magic tricks.

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To return to Lieutenant Columbo:

The man liked eggs. He would often show up at crime scenes with a hardboiled egg and would spend a few moments trying to find a hard surface on which to break the shells. It strikes me now that the eggs were a late addition to the show. When Columbo started in the early 70s, a wet cigar was Columbo’s accoutrement. As science learned more about the dangers of second hand smoke, I wonder if the producers tried to replace the cigar with the egg.

There are entire magic books dedicated to doing sleight of hand with cigarettes, but I will let it go at that.

 

*The American magician Dan Harlan rightfully points out that it’s inaccurate to refer to the trick as silk to egg because that is NOT the effect. The effect is that a fake egg has turned into a real egg. Small point, I guess, since Silk to Egg sounds better than Fake Egg to Real Egg.

**So many times I have started performing this effect only to realize that I have forgotten my glass. Sometimes, I will simply drop the egg on the ground and let it break there. I don’t advise doing that if you’re performing in Buckingham Palace.