More than 3000 years ago
If you watch TV you may have seen sport stacking star Luke Meyers who stacks the plastic cups at breath taking speed and then sets inside this giant shell and promotes the “Incredible edible egg.” Well the slogan has been around for more than 30 years, and that’s what the egg is. A large egg has only 70 calories, but has 13 essential nutrients and 6 grams of the highest quality protein of any food. While the historical records for eggs go back as far as 1400 BC, today the U.S. produces 10 percent of the world’s supply of eggs, with some farm flocks being more than 1 million hens. A good hen will produce between 250 to 300 eggs per year, one day at a time, which means that the one dozen egg carton you buy in the store took 16 days to produce. Now that is a bargain.
My first years were on a farm in Vermont. We had cows, chickens and hogs. From that we had milk, eggs, bacon and butter, and mom made homemade bread. From that mom would sometimes make my very favorite breakfast, which I have listed the recipe for below for Milk Toast and Eggs.
Milk Toast and Eggs
Ingredients:
-2 slices of bread
-2 eggs
-2 slices thick-cut bacon
-1/2 cup milk
-Butter
Directions:
Toast the bread and butter. Place on plate side by side. Fry the bacon crisp and pat dry.
Soft boil the eggs (about 3 minutes) and place on the toast. Taken out of the shell of course! Chop into small pieces and spread over the toast. Place small slivers of butter all over the eggs. Heat the milk to almost the boiling point. (Not Quite). Gently poor all over the eggs and toast. Season it with salt and pepper.
P.S. We were poor, but my parents didn’t tell me that, so I didn’t know that until many years later.
Unusual kitchen tip: The risk of an egg being contaminated with Salmonella bacteria is very low, about 1 in 20,000 eggs. But there’s no reason to take the risk of contracting food borne illness. Proper handling of eggs can reduce, and even entirely eliminate, the risk. When cracking an egg crack it on a flat surface. When you crack it on the edge of a bowl the shell is indented into the egg causing small chips of the shell to separate and enter into the egg. Salmonella bacteria, if found at all, is on the outside of the egg shell, not on the inside of the egg shell.
