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Hearing that Prince Charles has staff boil seven eggs slightly differently in his search for the perfect yoke left me with mixed feelings.
On the one hand there’s the obvious waste of it all. Added to that is the annoyance that Charlie’s system seems all wrong. He has seven eggs boiled and numbered from soft to hard. The quickest route to the right egg should be to start with number four, then six if too soft or two if too hard. If they’re wrong the next egg will be the one; found in three goes tops. But Charlie appears to start at five, if that’s too hard his best next best choice is two or three, if three’s too hard one or two could be right; it could take up to four goes to find the right egg (knowing Charlie, even more).
Charlie takes his egg at the end of a day’s hunting, during which he’s given vent to his animalistic side and proved himself closer to nature than those of us who shy away from inflicting pain and suffering in the name of fun. So having won some environmental brownie points, he perhaps feels enough credit has been earned to waste six eggs and however much power and water went into boiling them.
On the other hand, I’m partial to a boiled egg myself and news of Charlie’s latest eccentricity came just after I’d ordered an egg boiler from Amazon. Boiling an egg is never as simple as it seems. Lately I’ve been fighting off the risk of cracking by placing the egg in cold water, so as not to shock the shell. This doesn’t always work so I add vinegar, which stops the white spreading, as insurance. Even so, my timing is far from perfect.
The egg boiler is a great gadget, though rather than boil the egg it steams it. You place the right amount of water in a tray (far less than you’d normally use) and an alarm goes off when it’s run dry and the egg’s ready. Sure there’s a little experimentation with water levels, but consistency is more or less assured. Why not buy an egg boiler for Charlie? Get Amazon to gift wrap it and send it to Prince Charles at Clarence House, St James’s Palace, London, SW1 1BA.
