How well do you know eggs?

May 1, 2024 by
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Eggs are a staple food in nearly every cuisine, nearly indispensable in both cooking and baking. Although chicken eggs are the most commonly eaten kind today, throughout human history eggs from other birds were more popular. Plus our ancestors were eating eggs over 300,000 years ago! I learned these facts and more in Great British Chefs’ comprehensive guide to eggs.

carton of eggs

Historians believe that chickens were domesticated approximately 4,000 years ago in Thailand, coinciding with the practice of farming millet and rice. Even though people have been raising chickens ever since, it was only just over 100 years ago that they began to be hatched in incubators on an industrial scale. Today, people eat hundreds of billions of eggs annually worldwide, with an average of 161 eggs per person.

The Great British Chefs article explores the various parts that make up an egg, noting that there are more parts to an egg besides the yolk and the white. The article also explains differences between various types of eggs ranging from chicken to quail to duck to ostrich. Ostrich eggs are about twenty times the size of a chicken egg, with much tougher shells. You’d have to be feeding a crowd to want to crack into one of those!

My favorite way to eat eggs on their own is poached, preferably topped with hollandaise sauce. I’m also a fan of quiche, frittata, and basically any form of savory or sweet custard including ice cream. In fact, I can’t think of a way that I don’t enjoy eggs. I even like cocktails made with either the yolk or the white (Ramos gin fizz FTW). The EYB Library contains a separate filter under Dish Types just for egg dishes, and there are over 14,000 online recipes with this designation.

Category: Antipasto

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5 Comments

  • ccav  on  May 1, 2024

    I enjoy cooked eggs but can’t eat anything (knowingly) with raw egg, or a soft-boiled egg. It’s something about the texture.
    Also, I wonder what the difference is taste-wise between chicken, duck, quail and ostrich eggs.

  • eliza  on  May 2, 2024

    Like you Darcie, I enjoy eggs in many forms and I’m very lucky in that I get most of my eggs from my sister who has a small farm (brown, dark brown, blue, and green in colour.) Before using eggs raw in icings etc, I pasteurize mine sous vide to be on the safe side.

  • saladdays  on  May 2, 2024

    Many years ago we spent several summer holidays renting a cottage on a smallholding in North Wales where the owners kept peacocks and guinea fowl. We never had peahen eggs (!) but we ate many guinea fowl eggs, slightly smaller than a hen’s egg but much creamier and richer with golden yolks. I don’t think I have ever seen them on sale anywhere.

  • lkgrover  on  May 2, 2024

    ccav,
    I have eaten goose eggs, which are much larger than chicken eggs. It took about 50 minutes to hard-boil one. It tasted the same as chicken eggs.

  • KarenGlad  on  May 5, 2024

    One of our rural neighbours had a yard full of various fowl and offered a “barnyard mix” in a carton held closed by an elastic at her roadside stand. The eggs ranged in size from a little quail egg to a large goose egg. Due to their environment they all tasted like an egg from a healthy bird.

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