EVERYTHING IT’S CRACKED UP TO BE

Is the outrage over a $300 egg spoon elitist, sexist or just plain ridiculous? Laura Brehaut

The New York Times called it one of the “great food culture wars of the 21st century.” It all began in 2009 when pioneer of California cuisine and champion of the Slow Food movement, Alice Waters, cooked an egg over an open fire in an iron spoon for a reporter on an episode of 60 Minutes.

The segment was meant to illustrate Waters’s crusade for better food – and while supporters declared the results “delectable” and the method “legendary,” critics dismissed it as elitist, pretentious and unnecessary. No commentator was quite as cruel as Anthony Bourdain, however. The author and television host condemned Waters for the act. “She’s Pol Pot in a muumuu,” he said at the time, likening the chef to the Cambodian dictator. “I saw her on 60 Minutes. She used six cords of wood to cook one egg for Lesley Stahl.”

Bourdain, it should be noted, has never found the need to suggest Francis Mallman’s Patagonian methods for barbecuing food are the culinary equivalent of a tyrant’s reign of terror. In fact, as Kat Kinsman points out in Extra Crispy, Mallmann appeared on The Mind of a Chef to demonstrate his renowned open-fire cooking techniques. “At no point does he whip out an egg spoon, but I just know in the depths of my soul that if he had, no one would have made a peep about how pretentious that was,” writes Kinsman. “They’d just be crowing about how he’s (a) goddamned baller.”

Nevertheless, the saga lay dormant until earlier this year, when Chez Panisse ( Water’s restaurant in Berkeley, Calif.) alumnus Tamar Adler sang its praises in an interview. “Though I cringe to admit it, I not only own, but love, a hand- forged egg spoon,” she told Grub Street, adding that she used to use campfire pie irons, which “worked just as well.”

Adler’s admission spurred a new raft of criticism, as did the fact that a version of the original – Alice’s Egg Spoon – is now for sale at $ 321 ( US$ 250) a pop. Waters’s daughter, Fanny Singer, commissioned the 53-cm spoons from blacksmith Shawn Lovell. She sells them through her website, Permanent Collection, with five per cent of sales going to The Edible Schoolyard Project, Waters’s non-profit organization.

Critics, such as one commenter on the recent New York Times examination, view the spoon as “performative rusticity.” Supporters are quick to point out the hypocrisy over such criticism, however. Chef and author Samin Nosrat, for one, considers the spoon method to be “probably a lot less elitist” than using a pricey sous vide machine. “Is it any more practical to sous- vide an egg? No,” she said. “But it’s this amazing thing because a man is using it.”

Surely choosing to cook an egg in an iron spoon over an open fire rather than in a frying pan over a stovetop element or nestled in a microwavable egg poacher is simply that – a choice. It’s a decision like any other made in the kitchen on a daily basis; one based on creativity, necessity and access.