British Egg Week: The best egg dish from countries around the world
This week is British Egg Week, an event organised in association with British Lion Eggs. The event aims to promote British eggs and demonstrate for parents and their children how versatile the food can be. This year’s theme is ‘eggs make a meal out of anything’, so in honour of this we present the best egg dish from around the world.
Basically a Chinese omelette, egg foo young translates literally as ‘lotus egg’. Take the basic egg mixture, add whatever meat or vegetables you like and fry it hot - it’s changed so much in its adoption into Chinese American cuisine that the only thing which really remains is the basic recipe. If you have any leftover you can even stick it between two slices of white bread, add pickle, lettuce, tomato and mayo and create a St. Paul Sandwich, a dish originating from the St. Louis, Missouri area.
With a name meaning ‘rancher’s eggs’, huevos rancheros is a traditional mid-morning recipe originating on rural farms in Mexico. Like many of these recipes, all sorts of regional variations have developed, but the basic dish is fried eggs served on a lightly fried corn tortilla, covered with a tomato and chili sauce. Eat on its own, or serve it with sides of refried beans and rice. Breaking Bad fans will remember Jesse serving it for breakfast for his mildly-surprised girlfriend.
Akuri (India)
Akuri is a spicy scrambled egg dish originating traditionally from the Parsi community of India. Scramble the eggs until just about runny and then add fried onions and spices such as ginger, coriander, chopped chilis and black pepper. A variation is Bharuchi akuri from the city of Bharuch in north-west India, which adds dried fruits such as raisins and nuts like almonds and pistachios. Serve it with roti, an Indian unleavened bread, or just ordinary toast.
Translated literally as ‘steamed in a tea bowl’, chawanmushi is a savoury egg custard dish flavoured with ginkgo tree seeds, soy sauce, dashi (Japanese cooking stock) and mirin (a Japanese rice wine). It is usually served as an appetiser. To the mixture is added other ingredients such as shiitake mushrooms, kamaboko (a steamed and then cooled fish product) and boiled shrimp. The dish is named after the tea-cup-like container it is served in. Add udon (thick wheat flour noodles) and it becomes odamaki mushi.
Loco Moco (Hawaii)
Not so much a traditional dish as a contemporary one, loco moco consists of white rice topped with a hamburger, a fried egg and a brown gravy. The dish was apparently invented in 1949 by the owners of the Lincoln Grill in Hilo, Hawaii after teenagers wanted something different from American sandwiches and quicker to prepare than Asian food. The first boy to try the food had the nickname of Loco (crazy in Portugese) and moco was tacked on the end because it sounded kind of cool.
Egg drop soup is a Chinese type of soup made from beaten eggs in a chicken broth. Stracciatella is an Italian variation popular around Rome, where it is traditionally served at the start of Easter lunches. To the egg drop mixture is added parmesan cheese, lemon zest, nutmeg and seasoning. Some variations also add spinach or semolina to turn it into a full meal. Stracciatella means ‘little shreds’ and describes the strands of cooked egg which float in the soup.
Hangtown Fry (USA)
Hangtown Fry is a luxurious omelette fried with breaded oysters and bacon named after its place of origin (now called Placerville) during the 1850s Californian gold rush. Two equally interesting accounts of the dish’s creation exist, and no one knows which one is true. Story 1 is that a gold prospector struck it rich in the Californian town, headed to the nearest hotel and demanded the most expensive dish they could provide. Story 2 is it was requested as an inmate’s last meal at the county jail, delaying his execution by a day because of how long it would take to bring oysters in. Add onions, bell peppers or various spices because your time on this earth isn’t as scarce.
Avgolemono (or egg-lemon) is a combination of egg and lemon juice which is mixed with a (often chicken) broth and heated until it thickens. It can be used as a sauce to accompany vegetables, chicken or fish, in stew-like dishes to thicken the juices or even just on its own as a soup. It can be tricky to get right, so make sure the broth is warm, but not boiling hot because you don’t want the eggs to curdle. Greeks break the fast of Lent with Magiritsa soup, which is an avgolemono soup of lamb offal.
In Arabic slang, shakshouka means ‘a mixture’. The mixture in question is quite similar to huevos rancheros - eggs poached in a spicy sauce of tomatoes, chili, onions and cumin. Believed to have originated in Tunisia, the dish can also be found across the Middle East in Libyan, Algerian, Moroccan and Egyptian cuisine and Israel too, introduced by Tunisian Jews. If you require meat, try adding a spicy sausage like chorizo.
If all these savoury egg dishes have you clamouring for dessert, why not try these Portuguese egg tart pastries. They were created by Catholic monks before the eighteenth century in the Jerónimos Monastery, Lisbon in order to use leftover egg yolks. Later on in the face of closure the monks started selling pastéis de nata at a local sugar refinery, who eventually opened a business which continues to bake them according to a secret recipe to this day. Luckily they’ve spread around the world and you can create them for yourselves from plenty of not-so-secret recipes.
What are your favourite egg recipes from around the world? Post your comments below or tweet us @canteentweets
By Stuart Armstrong
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