Life Over Easy: The Privilege of Soft Eggs

I like my eggs like I like my steak, medium. As a Black person, I am often alone in my social circles with this preference, but nevertheless, I persist.

An ex of mine insisted on making the eggs when we cooked breakfast together. Another ex would remind me to “actually cook the eggs,” when he heard the skillet hit the stove. This summer, while making eggs for the man in my bed, I nudged him and asked, “do you like your eggs hard or soft?” He looked at me as if I’d asked the dumbest question in life and muttered, “uh…hard,” before going back to sleep. I removed my eggs from the skillet, before cooking all the flavor and juice out of his.

My daddy doesn’t even eat eggs.

My play-twin (one of my besties who even my mother mistook for me once in a photo) and I ordered biscuits a week ago at Comeback Coffee. “Can you make sure my eggs are scrambled hard hard, please?” she asked. I laughed and asked for them “as they come,” knowing the eggs there to be pillowy-soft and moist.

My mother taught me the joy of soft eggs that are salted, peppered, and lightly scrambled. Because she enjoyed eggs that way, I learned to make and enjoy them in this manner as well. My cousin, Robin, who was Mommy’s caretaker, was also well-versed in proper egg preparation. I remember the chagrin I felt when my mom asked Robin to make her eggs because “she pays attention…you’ll be on your phone and let them get hard.” My non-egg-eating Daddy was exempt from learning this skill.

I feel slight shame in admitting that while my mother introduced me to soft scrambled eggs, it was Chrissy Teigen who showed me the joy of a beautiful egg over easy being split open onto a dish. Influenced by social media, as I often am, I made a fried rice bowl one day and decided to make my egg like Chrissy. The creamy, salty, warm yolk spilled into my rice and all of my inner Blackness shouted “SALMONELLA” but I dipped my fork into the bowl and I have never eaten my homemade fried rice the same. (Memphians - the duck fried rice at SOB comes with a beautiful egg over easy atop it. Don’t push it to the side! Divide the yolk and let it spill into the dish. I promise you’ll love it!)

SOB Memphis’ Duck Fried Rice w/ Egg Over Easy

This morning, or afternoon because I slept in, I made two eggs as my mother would. With the heat on low, I placed a small pat of butter in the skillet and let it melt. I added two eggs, stirred but not scrambled, to the melting butter and let them cook slowly, adding salt, pepper, and shredded cheese. I stirred the eggs slightly as they cooked and removed the skillet from the heat a minute before I was ready to plate them, letting the yolk firm a bit more but retaining the eggs’ softness. The eggs spilled onto my plate, holding their shape but wobbly with the subtle presence of yolk. They were delicious. They tasted like home.

As I cooked my eggs, I wondered why Black people tend to have an aversion to preparations such as soft-boiled, medium rare, and over-easy. My theory is that the aversion is rooted in the economic oppression that we collectively experience. Salmonella or food poisoning is an expensive risk that we cannot afford financially or time-wise. The risk of either of these illnesses from rare preparations is low, but the apprehension is likely passed down from our grand and great-grandparents who lived in a time when such food-borne illnesses were more common. Unlike chitlins, which we learned to clean out of necessity, our familiarity with rare meat and eggs was limited and thus avoided.

I love me some soft eggs. I recognize the privilege in food exploration and can only hope, that with so many other constraints, more of us (Black folks) get the privilege and opportunity to try new things that feel like risks, from flying on planes to eating runny eggs, without worry or shame. If you want to start with eggs, try my mama’s way as shared in the above paragraph. She was raised in N. Memphis and the Southside of Chicago and she expanded her palette from where she began in more ways than one.