Day 29: E-Day

I’ve been keeping a secret from you all weekend. Normally I am terrible at keeping secrets, and would have been hopping around biting my lip, arms flapping, desperate to tell someone. But it’s not that kind of secret. I held this one back for dramatic effect. You might have noticed that I didn’t mention demo on Friday; that’s because I didn’t want to let the cat, or should I say chicken, out of the bag. Today is E-Day. Today we are making omelettes.

In a way, I can’t believe today has taken this long to dawn upon us. If you watch Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares you will know that the first thing he asks the chef to do in any restaurant desperate enough to enlist his help is to “cook me a fucking omelette.” On Saturday kitchen they time celebrity chefs making omelettes for a leaderboard. It is a kind of barometer of culinary prowess. I am surprised we weren't lined up doing it on day one.

Before the egg-a-thon I kick off my day by making marzipan. I’d never really thought about marzipan before - I didn’t realise you could make it. I thought it came out of the ground in little yellow bricks or something. Anyway, it turns out you can. You make a syrup, add ground almonds and when it has cooled a little you fold in a beaten egg white. For today’s purposes, I take my marzipan and stuff it inside some cored and peeled apples which I then roll in melted butter, sugar and cinnamon and bake in the oven for an hour or so. I also stuff a few dates as petit fours. The apples come out looking disgusting but tasting great. I have a big gap to fill in my morning so bake up a couple more soda breads. I’m beginning to get the hang of these and they turn out pretty well.

Meanwhile, the omelette cooking is about to begin. My teacher (a wonderful lady named Florrie) takes three of us and puts us to work. They teach a very specific ‘technique’ here, that involves drawing a non-stick fish slice from the outside of the pan towards the centre as you tilt towards it, allowing the wet egg to flow to the edges and rippling the centre of the omelette, giving it body. Rather than working around the pan, you do this on the points of the compass. Then, leaving the omelette for a few seconds, you flip it over towards the centre before turning the handle through 90º, taking an underhand grip, lifting it to almost vertical and allowing the omelette to slide off the pan and onto a warmed plate.

Having never made an omelette in my life, all this seems like witchcraft to me. I have my first go. It is ok. I mean, it looks a bit anaemic and not remotely appetising, and I felt a bit like Johnny Five Thumbs stabbing around the pan with my blunt spatula, but it was ok. (Incidentally, I learnt on Saturday that kitchen slang for a spatula is a Maurice, and hereby resolve to henceforth only refer to it as such). I galvanise myself for a second attempt.

Is that pan smoking hot? In goes the tablespoon of clarified butter. My two eggs are whisked together with a little drop of water and seasoned, ready to make the giant leap from oeufdom to omelettehood. There is no turning back. The centre of the pan receives them gratefully and they spread out towards the perimeter. As they reach the limits of their new world, my Maurice heroically intervenes and scoops them up, dragging the cooked parts to the heart of the omelette as the runny eggy bits are drawn irrevocably to the naked Teflon. I coax and cajole my way around the pan through north, south, east and west, before flipping and turning the omelette onto the plate like a wizened old pro.

Now I was deliberately romanticising there because I am trying to distract you from what happened next. I have to taste the omelette. I don’t really give a shit about this - its no big deal; I just don’t like eggs. I try it. It’s not bad. I mean it’s not repulsive or offensive. I just don’t get it. I try another bit. Still not bad. Actually, I think it might be growing on me. I’m pretty hungry as it goes. I have another bit. I bet it would be nice with a filling of some description. Some mushroom a la crème perhaps? Florrie is loving this - she is straight to the other side of the kitchen stealing mushroom a la crème from someone and ordering me to make another one. And I do. And I eat it. And it tastes good.

I pondered only very briefly over the Making Omelettes, Breaking Eggs title for this blog. (Incidentally the sansoeuf bit is taken from an impromptu rant in Franglais at a Parisian waiter who brought me a croque madame, adorned with a fried egg, as opposed to a croque monsieur). Pretty much all my friends know I hate eggs. But more than that, I wanted something that would evoke the chaos and destruction of my presence in the kitchen, and the creations that would emerge from it. And, in a wider sense, my life perhaps. The egg and the omelette provide the perfect metaphor.

Today’s example just goes to prove it. I don’t like eggs, but this morning I happily wolfed down an omelette. Because once those eggs hit that pan, they are no longer eggs. They change. They transform. They transfigure. Something magical occurs, almost quasi-religious. So much of cooking is about this - it is the taking of one thing, doing something to it, and changing it into something else. (The rest of cooking is about the opposite; taking something, doing hardly anything to it, and making it even more like itself). For me, with the humble egg, it will always be a case of the former. Without the alchemy, an oeuf is just an oeuf.