"...To use eggs in unexpected ways?" I thought that was the job of Thai "entertainers", but it's an option for us now as well, with a hundred ovo-positive recipes. But before we get to them, we have a lot of wading to do. Yes, beyond the discussions of this and that, the technique for a simple scrambled, the ideal time for a poached, or for pickling eggs, we get a heck of a lot of lifestyle porn and autobiography, as if this was the kind of recipe book with the curator's name waaaaay above the title, which it didn't seem to be. So in amongst food safety tips and preservation guides, there are reflections on keeping the chickens in the first place, and the first echt recipe beyond the Eggs 101 instruction comes a long way in.
Cue a whole two paragraphs telling us what breakfast means.
Now, some people will immediately take a dislike to these recipes for 'health' reasons. Eggs fried in heavy cream? Eggs baked in heavy cream? Eggs on toast with about a thousand calories of avocado in between? I mean, we've already given vegans conniptions just from the title, is nobody due a break? Sadly, these people will have to learn to let us live and enjoy life, which this book seems to do. Only after breakfast is over do we really to do things with eggs, like turn them into pancakes, "popovers" (miniature Yorkies to have with a sweet topping) or bread pudding. It seems you're not only taken through the day here but carried along on a wave from simplicity to complexity, with things like 'making your own Scotch eggs' and, er, smothering bacon with a gallon of sugar and maple syrup mix to bake, which involves no eggs whatsoever and seems here for the sheer trigger warning hell of it. The final chunk involves mucho baking, and things I can't be bothered to do – however much I love tiramisu I can't see me making my own.
Visually, we don't get a full photo for every recipe, which is probably a good thing, but when they're full-page they can still seem a waste of space (and the last omelette here seems half-cooked, what's more). The chief way of rating these books for me is (a) how much of the page is dross, and there's not too much in the introductory sentences for every recipe that is superfluous, and (b) how much I take screen grabs of for future reference. Here I did pull more recipes than the norm, even if the chance of me worrying about doing egg drop soup any time soon is very slight. Perhaps the biggest thing I took from this is how close the salad nicoise looked to a ramen in the mise-en-place mode. Now there's an experiment.
All told, this is a success – a friendly, welcoming cook book that doesn't demand ridiculous ingredients or skill, and doesn't pretend to the most pretentious of dishes imported from southern Antiquistan and inherited from troglodytic yak herders. It's homely, it's easy to read – meaning it makes sense, and it makes sense to try these dishes, and it makes sense to buy the book. With its unexpected variety, it's a strong four stars.