Runny eggs still quite legal
By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer
As soon as reports started circulating last week about a new "law" banning soft-cooked eggs, I knew I would have to check in right away with The Advertiser's resident bon vivant and health food curmudgeon, Ferd Borsch.
Even before I could call him, though, Borsch was on my line, raging against the machine.
"You gotta write something about those big brothers watching over us," he said. "Now they're even telling us how we've got to cook our eggs. That's not right. They say it's for health reasons, but what good is a hard yolk in a loco moco if it doesn't melt into the goodness of the gravy or soak into the rice?"
Some other people were saying much the same thing around town. They wouldn't want their Spam and eggs anymore if the eggs couldn't be cooked over-easy. Eggs benedict just wouldn't be the same with poached eggs. It's not a real Caesar salad if it doesn't begin with a raw egg.
"The best thing about an egg is the runny yolk," Borsch went on. "I'll tell you how to eat an egg. First, you eat all that white stuff, because that's the part that doesn't taste any good anyway. Then you break open the yolk and you put a lot of salt on it. Then you sop a buttermilk biscuit — with extra butter, real butter, not that margarine stuff — into the yolk and eat it all together. Now, that is living. But I suppose even that will be against the law if those health nuts have their way."
I wanted to stop him, but there were two problems. One, he was on a rant and roll and it was too much fun to interrupt. And two, he was talking into my answering machine, just minutes before flying off to Oregon for what he said was some real Dungeness crab with a creamy sauce.
Anyway, what I wanted to tell him was that it isn't true. Despite some of the rumors around town, nobody is banning soft-boiled eggs. The government isn't outlawing eggs-over-easy. You can still cook a one-minute egg in the privacy of your home.
The reports were so out of control, though, that the American Egg Board felt compelled to put out a press release on the myths and facts of egg-eating. There's no new law, no new regulation. Just an upcoming label on egg cartons that will warn people to refrigerate eggs and cook them thoroughly to avoid the risk of salmonella. To which the folks at the Egg Board in Washington respond: Only one egg per 20,000 is contaminated with salmonella, and the average consumer, who eats 260 eggs per year, will encounter a dangerous one only once in 84 years.
So I wanted to tell Borsch not to worry. His runny eggs were safe and so was he. But he already had moved on, talking to my machine.
"Next they'll be telling us how to cook our steak," he said. "I suppose they'll want everyone to eat a steak well done. You might as well eat shoe leather. The real way to eat a steak is to let the juices go, let the blood flow. Now, that's living."
