End of a shell-tered existence
The shame and ignominy of the egg salad sandwich Calum Marsh
IT IS CURIOUS THAT A FOOD UNIVERSALLY BELOVED, PLIANT AND UBIQUITOUS SHOULD BE SO WIDELY LOATHED.
At lunchtime in my elementary school classroom, the thing I most wanted to eat was the very last thing I would allow myself. It was an egg salad sandwich: the apex of culinary sophistication, it seemed to me at the time, and so deeply satisfying that, in the privacy of my home, it was all I would hope for, the meal I’d cherish ecstatically bite after bite.
But in school I would refuse – this was a pleasure I had learned early to deny myself. Nothing invites humiliation and shame upon a schoolboy so profoundly as an egg salad sandwich and its telltale room-enveloping smell. “Ew,” I recall a child at an adjacent desk declaring, at the top of her voice, when I first unveiled my prized repast in public. “That is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard of!” Others struck a chorus of appalled agreement, and the point was made. Never was I so foolish to bring this ignominious snack to school again.
Now, an egg salad sandwich is really a wonderful thing – a tender, chewy, mild-flavoured delight, striking visually (that chunky daffodil-coloured mash cradled by bakery-fresh bread!) and as agreeable to the palate as the richest dessert. Who first determined that a couple immaculate ovoidal bone- white eggs could be so fruitfully boiled, chopped and blended with creamy mayonnaise? Some 18th- century Frenchman who divined that eggs might pair well with what is essentially itself a thick egg sauce? An inspired union, to be sure: and still the recipe can be tweaked or augmented by the creative- minded, for instance by adding a squeeze of lemon juice or a tablespoon of dijon mustard, some diced chives or chopped celery. I have been enjoying egg salad sandwiches for as long as I can remember. Damn the unshakeable disgrace. I cannot imagine ever exhausting their simple reassuring appeal.
But science conspires against egg salad; it devises to besmirch its reputation with olfactory scandal. The white of an egg consists mainly of water. But it also contains a protein called ovalbumin, which itself bears a miniscule trace of sulfur – just three atoms of its total 3000, though enough when heated to produce pungent, malodorous hydrogen sulfide gas. Boiling an egg breaks up its ovalbumin protein chains and agitates the gas, causing it to expand inward and react with the iron in the egg’s yolk. This reaction produces ferrous sulfide and ferric sulfide – the cause of the greenish discolouration of the yellow yolk. The longer the egg boils, the more severe the reaction of the chemicals, and the more tenaciously noxious your poor sandwich ultimately becomes. There are methods of reducing the smell caused by this process, such as removing the boiling water from the element or plunging the eggs into ice cold water as soon as the cooking is complete. But when it comes to scent, there’s only so much an ashamed egg salad enthusiast can do.
Still, it is curious that a food universally beloved, pliant and ubiquitous should be so widely loathed in this one particular form – that, despite the high esteem in which we hold the scrambled egg, the quiche, the omelette, eggs benedict, huevos rancheros, frittatas, french toast and even the egg sandwich when the egg happens instead to be fried, we continue to reject the egg salad sandwich en masse, not merely dismissing it as not to one’s taste but actively impugning the discrimination of those of us who deign to admire the style. Is it a matter of the disturbance seemingly caused that incites such contempt among nearby diners? An egg sandwich is perhaps a somewhat intrusive food – its odour, alas, is rather unavoidable for anyone in the vicinity of the meal, which means that the pleasure of the eater entails a demand on others at the same time. I suppose the question then becomes one of etiquette. Is the deep satisfaction an egg salad sandwich brings one person justifiable in the face of the displeasure it causes at large? We each of us must ask ourselves this question.
Sandwich pain may be worth sandwich love.