Poached Eggs

My mother has sent me an egg cooker for my birthday. A friend had recommended it to me after I had explained that, much as I love poached eggs, I was incapable of cooking them aright. They were either underdone and came out slimey, or hard and over done, the yokes a yellow putty. Worse still, some disintegrated in the pan, and barely made the plate. I had begun microwaving them, but it was a fine line between under and over-cooking. I had therefore generally had to content myself with fried or boiled. Although the egg cooker took a little bit of getting used to, the eggs it poaches are usually perfect. For the first half dozen I ate, it felt like I was eating a hotel’s cooked breakfast, so hard was the white and runny the yoke. My days of eating poached rubber and liquid mucus are over.

There are few references in scripture to the consumption of eggs; the commercial and domestic rearing of chickens was likely a later development. Asks Job in 6:6:

Can flavourless food be eaten without salt? Or is there any taste in the white of an egg?

Some scholars even doubt if this reference applies to eggs, some preferring ‘the whey of cheese’. Still, Job’s rhetorical question requires some thought, for his point is not clear. He might be rebuking Eliphaz’s assertion that one should be patient, as being tasteless and insipid. Or he is saying that certain things naturally go together; bland food must be accompanied by salt; egg white can seldom be eaten alone. It requires the rich yoke to both compliment and offset the white’s unpalatability. As Barnes remarks:

‘that in his sufferings there was a real ground for lamentation and complaint - as there was for making use of salt in that which is unsavoury.’

Matthew Henry paraphrases him thus:

Men do commonly complain of their meat when it is but unsavoury, how much more when it is so bitter as mine is!

Job is defending his right to feel aggrieved by providence’s severe decrees. Just as I loathe an uncooked egg, so Job loathes a life seemingly outside of God’s blessing. Without His lovingkindness, life is a tasteless parody, a dull bleakness of banal godlessness. In our time, too many are content to feast on egg white, while the wholesome Bread of Life remains untouched and disregarded.