Notable Sandwiches #63: Egg

"I like to think the world was born from an egg that cracked and became the world"

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, a weekly feature in which my editor David Swanson and I nibble our way through the bonkers document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week: the egg sandwich, in all its variations.

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Then the daughter of the Ether,
Now the hapless water-mother,
Raised her shoulders out of water,
Raised her knees above the ocean,
That the duck might build her dwelling,
Build her nesting-place in safety.
Thereupon the duck in beauty,
Flying slowly, looking round her,
Spies the shoulders of the maiden,
Sees the knees of Ether’s daughter,
Now the hapless water-mother,
Thinks them to be grassy hillocks,
On the blue back of the ocean.
Thence she flies and hovers slowly,
Lightly on the knee she settles,
Finds a nesting-place befitting,
Where to lay her eggs in safety.
Here she builds her humble dwelling,
Lays her eggs within, at pleasure,
Six, the golden eggs she lays there,
Then a seventh, an egg of iron;
Sits upon her eggs to hatch them,
Quickly warms them on the knee-cap
Of the hapless water-mother;
Hatches one day, then a second,
Then a third day sits and hatches.
Warmer grows the water round her,
Warmer is her bed in ocean,
While her knee with fire is kindled,
And her shoulders too are burning,
Fire in every vein is coursing.
Quick the maiden moves her shoulders,
Shakes her members in succession,
Shakes the nest from its foundation,
And the eggs fall into ocean,
Dash in pieces on the bottom
Of the deep and boundless waters.
In the sand they do not perish,
Not the pieces in the ocean;
But transformed, in wondrous beauty
All the fragments come together
Forming pieces two in number,
One the upper, one the lower,
Equal to the one, the other.
From one half the egg, the lower,
Grows the nether vault of Terra:
From the upper half remaining,
Grows the upper vault of Heaven;
From the white part come the moonbeams,
From the yellow part the sunshine,
From the motley part the starlight,
From the dark part grows the cloudage;
And the days speed onward swiftly,
Quickly do the years fly over,
From the shining of the new sun
From the lighting of the full moon.

— Finnish creation myth, from the national epic the Kalevala, translated by John Crawford, 1888

You drink the milk and eat the egg
It doesn't last long and you become round
If you take care of the chicken
It’ll give you an egg

— Gatlas at Itlog, traditional Tagalog children’s rhyme, translated 

When you kill it at the edge of the pan, you don’t notice
That the egg grows an eye in death.

— from the poem “Egg” by Aleš Šteger, 2011

In the woods there grew a tree
And a fine fine tree was he
And on that tree there was a limb
And on that limb there was a branch
And on that branch there was a nest
And in that nest there was an egg
And in that egg there was a bird
And from that bird a feather came
And of that feather was

A bed 
And on that bed there was a girl
And on that girl there was a man
And from that man there was a seed
And from that seed there was a boy
And from that boy there was a man
And for that man there was a grave
From that grave there grew
A tree

— “Maypole,” The Wicker Man OST, 1973

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There’s a kind of ur-myth motif of the Cosmic Egg—the idea that the world hatched, at some point, and became the world. The Orphic cult of the Greeks had it that a hermaphroditic god came out of the cracked egg and created the other gods; Hindu creation myths feature a golden womb and a cosmic egg that, in the ancient text Brahmanda Purana, encompasses the entirety of the universe. The Zoroastrian creator god Ahura Mazda took three thousand years to fashion the sky and sea that served as the top and bottom halves of the material world’s eggshell; during this eon the sun stood motionless in the sky, and the first, perfect bull was born.

So much for the question of which came first: It was the egg, in enough cosmogonies to count. The egg is vast enough to contain the moon and the stars. Small enough to serve as breakfast.

Last night for dinner for my family I made a big batch of eggs—eight, the shell cracked and discarded along with its fragile permeable membrane, the yolks staring at me all orange and plump til I whisked them into a muddle and fried it with cheese. In another (possibly floating and egg-shaped) universe they could have been eight chicks. But they were cold when I cracked and poured them into the bowl. We had the eggs on sourdough toast.

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We come from eggs too, inseminated ones, hidden deep in the body. When I think about my eggs I picture them dropping like gumballs into my tubes, ever hopeful for fertilization, never realizing their potential, ending in a welter of blood. I know this is fanciful and they are very tiny, my mother is a gynecologist and would be appalled. But it’s hard enough to think of myself as containing a vast yet finite amount of eggs in the first place—hard enough to think I could if I wished someday (although the window is narrowing) produce human life via an egg (there are fewer every day) and some additional help (sperm is abundant) and from that egg stretching and collapsing and changing would grow a zygote and then an embryo and then a baby and then a man or woman who would come in time to both love and hate me (but it’s not going to happen, at this point I don’t think it ever will, that particular aspect of being human will be closed to me, and probably it is for the best, and I’m lucky to have the choice, so many women don’t). All beginning from a little egg! Everything begins from a little egg. Even a universe. Even a sandwich.

On the subject of eggs:

A thousand years ago in 2010 I was in Tatarstan a Russian province watching a festival of traditional Tatar music and dance. A line of young men and women in festive attire moved in lines forwards and backwards forwards and backwards interweaving to a lively tune and I thought it was a dance of love. A man with us who spoke Tatar explained that it was a song celebrating the virtues of eggs in the early springtime before the new crops ripen and while the winter stores are depleted. I looked up and the dancers were holding a gigantic platter of eggs. They sang out, thank you, eggs, and retreated in a whirl of skirts.

The ocean sunfish whose name in German is Schwimmender Kopf and which weighs between 545 and 1,000 pounds is the largest bony fish in the world and at any given time a female of the species can carry up to three hundred million eggs.

A female yellowhead jawfish lays between fifty and two hundred eggs in the male jawfish’s mouth, where they develop and hatch, part of a broad category of animals known as mouthbrooders, like the sea catfish or the little purple fish called the mbuna. During this time the male jawfish does not eat. He just holds the eggs in his mouth and waits.

We’ve already covered the bacon egg and cheese and the breakfast sandwich but these are staples of many convenient breakfasts to go and you can get them at food carts all over the city, preferably with a scalding cup of coffee, always with a layer of perfectly plasticine American cheese engulfing the foil-steamed egg like a protective sac. 

Jews eat eggs on monumental occasions—the great fast day of the Ninth of Av and on Passover. They symbolize the cycle of birth and death and for mourning we dip them in ashes.  

You might think eggs are a breakfast food because chickens lay their eggs in the morning but that isn’t true necessarily. Chickens lay on their own clock—their laying is cyclical and happens progressively later throughout the year until the cycle resets. While the ancient Romans did often include eggs in their morning meal, the egg breakfast did not obtain ubiquity until the Industrial Revolution, when pre-work meals had to be both rapidly attainable and proteinaceous. Workers with full stomachs work better until they can’t anymore.

I particularly enjoy a good egg salad especially when I am too anxious to eat solid food, which happens sometimes. I put in plenty of dill as a prerequisite and probably paprika. Even in better times I enjoy it as a sandwich. It reminds me of being a kid, although I don’t have any specific memories of egg salad as a kid and in fact don’t have a lot of childhood memories in general. Whole reams of my life are blank as paper and I don’t know why.

It’s hard to peel a hard-boiled egg, the membrane sticks to the white, to your fingers, cracks the shell, still trying to hold a thing together long after its original purpose was made obsolete. The resulting egg after the struggle looks like a moon full of craters or jagged ladders.

I like to think about the great eggs created by Peter Carl Fabergé for the house of Romanov; they are beautiful things; they have little jeweled peacocks inside them, ships, gold trees, miniature carriages with exquisite wheels. Tsar Alexander III had a habit of gifting jeweled easter eggs to his wife and in 1885 Fabergé was commissioned for the job and he made the First Hen egg with a golden hen inside sitting on golden straw. He made dozens more with his workshop for the royal family and the fifty-seven that survive remain magnificent, undimmed by time. When the Revolution came Fabergé took the last diplomatic train out of Riga and his son and mother fled to Finland in a sleigh, but the House of Fabergé lives on, laying its gemmed eggs long after the Romanovs expired in the basement of a merchant’s house all in a heap in July 1918.

Some birds steal other birds’ eggs and eat them. Snakes like bird eggs too. Every omnivore does. All that richness just a bite away or the peck of a beak. And also a life just a shell’s width from the world if it can make it to hatching. Eggs are a numbers game in general and the ones that fall or fail are part of the strategy. Nature can be cold that way, but a good egg sandwich is hot on the palm.

I like to think the world was born from an egg that cracked and became the world. Or that the world is held in a protective shell suspended in some great unknowable substrate. Warm with life and rich with potential. I like the idea othat the yolk became the sun and the speckles the stars. Imagine a great mouth eating the world in a sandwich. How final that would be. Or holding it so tenderly between its jaws until it hatches into something unimaginable and new.