BEACHCOMBER

103 YEARS OLD AND STILL BOILING EGGS METICULOUSLY...

SOCIAL isolation is surely an oxymoron. Isolation is antisocial, or at best asocial. Staying two metres apart is surely societal isolation, not social.

That apart, I am rather enjoying the peacefulness of it all which has given me time in the kitchen to try out new dishes.

I now make my own Mars bars and even bake my own sourdough bread.

I made the starter for this by stirring some flour into warm water and leaving it for a week to absorb yeast from the air, which it does as long as you feed it more flour and water daily. It’s like having a perfectly behaved, house-trained pet. It stays where you put it and it doesn’t bark. I have become so fond of my sourdough starter that I take it for walks in the grounds of Beachcomber Towers and sing lullabies to it. Our favourites are “Who’s Soury Now?” and “The Soury With The Fringe On Top”.

The resulting bread is delicious toasted and cut into soldiers to dip into eggs, which has inspired me to perfect my boiled egg formula.

I consider this to be one of my greatest contributions to culinary science.

It all began years ago when the great chef Marcus Wareing told me that the way to get a perfect soft-boiled egg was to put the egg in cold water, then bring it to the boil, cooking for a total of six minutes. This did not work for me, because after six minutes my water was still not boiling. I suspect that Wareing’s kitchen is more efficient than mine. After some experimentation, I came up with an adaptation of his formula better suited to my equipment. Instead of the simple T = 6 recipe (where T is the total cooking time), my improvement was 0.5 H + B = 4, where H is the time your water takes to boil and B is the time it is left boiling after that.

I told this to my offspring Junior but he reported back that his water had not boiled after eight minutes, which meant that B had to be zero and the egg was underdone. Clearly his hob is even slower than mine.

My latest research, however, has resulted in a further amendment: H/3 + B = 3.67.

In other words, divide the time your water takes to boil by three, then cook for however long it takes to bring that result up to three minutes and 40 seconds.

If your water takes longer than 11 minutes to boil, get a new cooker.