Egg

In 16th-century Netherlandish art an egg with two legs and a knife sticking out of the top is thought to represent a type of demon.

To prevent illness from bacteria: Keep eggs refrigerated, cook eggs until yolks are firm, and cook foods containing eggs thoroughly.

"You just need to cook your eggs thoroughly - no sunny-side up, no over-easy," advised FDA Commissioner Jane Henney. "This is a case when it's better to be safe than sorry."

From a USA Today story:
Salmonella illnesses associated with raw or undercooked eggs soared in the 1980s and 1990s, reaching a peak of 3.6 cases for every 100,000 people in 1996. The rate dropped to 2.2 cases per 100,000 people in 1998.

And now you know.

EGG

EGG is an acronym for evaporating gaseous globule, a type of astronomical object thought to be associated with the formation of new stars. Stars are thought to form when clouds of interstellar gas and dust collapse under their own gravity, becoming dense enough to ignite a self-sustaining fusion reaction. At this point, the embryonic star evaporates and drives off the gas and dust surrounding it, hence astromers have dubbed the objects evaporating gaseous globules or EGGs. The Hubble Space Telescope recently photographed young stars hatching from their EGGs in the Eagle Nebula, located in the constellation Serpens.

Eggs are a source of complete animal protein and the best kind of meat stretchers and meat substitutes. Recipe servings are adequate for nutritional needs and are frequently combined with foods such as pasta, rice and bread which is nice because it adds up to a larger serving than those nutritionally adequate serving of meant fish and poultry. It's great for those who enjoy a filling meal and still be able to eat correctly.

Buying Eggs:

Size: When crucial to a recipe amounts of eggs are given in liquid measure, but as a general rule recipes calling for eggs are commonly referring to Large eggs. Eggs at the market are most commonly available as extra large, large, and medium.

Grade: Standards set by the US Federal Government classify eggs as AA, A, B, and C . AA and A are best for poaching, frying, and eating in the shell. The yolks are firm, round and high. The thick white stands high around the yolk with a less amount of the thin white. Grade B eggs have the same nutritive value and are more economical as AA and A; they are perfectly acceptable for other uses than poaching, frying, or eating in the shell.

Color: Brown Eggs or white, pale yellow yolks or deep yellow ones-- all are the same when it comes to cooking performance and nutrition. Shell color is the result of pigmentation from feed or the yolk color.

Storing Eggs

Refrigerate eggs right after you buy them, store them with the large ends up to keep the yolks in the center. It's best to use them within a week. Leftover egg whites will keep in the fridge in a covered jar for 7 to 10 days. Cover the leftover yolks with water and store in a covered jar. Yolks will last only 2 to 3 days. Frequent uses for leftover yolks are Hollandaise Sauce or Cooked Salad Dressings. Use the whites for Meringue Kisses or Angel Food Cake.

Egg Equivalents

You will need 4 to 6 eggs to get the equivalent of a 1 cup measure or 8 to 10 whites or 12 to 14 yolks.

Helpful Hints

To break an egg, crack it on a flat surface rather than a sharp edge. The pieces that break will be larger and easier to find if they fall into the food being prepared.
Crack open and put whole eggs into plastic containers for easier storage and transportation during camping trips.

Source:

eggs:
www.placergrown.org/jsp/pg/114.jsp

My batter spattered Betty Crocker's Cookbook.

Man's relationship with the egg goes back to the dawn of history, when hunters, the earliest oviraptors, would rob bird's eggs from their nests, cracking the shells and eating them raw. It wasn't until 600 B.C. that the first chickens were domesticated, but by then, the egg had already become a major source of protein for the world's civilizations. The omelette is already known from the Roman world and the writings of Apicius, made with milk and sprinkled with pepper and honey. By the time of the French revolution, roughly 685 different recipes were known for preparing eggs. Today, there are over 240 million hens, of some 200 different breeds, in America alone, laying roughly 50 billion eggs per year.

As a general principle, it is no surprise that an item so important to the staple diet would be incorporated into a people's mythology. Egyptian and Canaanite myths include complex cosmogenies in which the universe was sprung from an egg; in the Canaanite, the heavens and earth and all living things were formed when the great cosmic egg, Mot, was cracked open. In the ancient Pelasgian myths, the great mother Euronyme mated with Ophion in the form of a dove, and layed the universal egg from which all things then sprang. Later, in pagan Germanic ritual, an egg was cracked open in the festivals of spring to symbolize rebirth and the cycle of creation. This became easily incorporated into the Christian symbolism of Christ's rebirth and resurrection, the history of the modern Easter Egg.

Of course, many animals lay eggs, including reptiles, fish, and the occasional platypus. Lest we lose all focus, however, let us concentrate on the eggs of fowl. The egg is composed of 8 different parts:

• Shell: a hard protective layer composed mostly of calcium carbonate, formed within the chicken to encase the embryo. A single shell may contain as many as 17,000 tiny pores, designed to allow certain gases to pass freely, that the embryo can "breathe". This is also the unfortunate mechanism by which certain bacteria infect the egg, usually because of unsanitary handling procedures. An egg's thickness and size vary widely by breed and species. Turtle shells and shark eggs, for example, have thick, leathery casings. The colour of a chicken egg depends on the colour of the chicken's earlobes; white eggs are laid by chickens with white earlobes, brown eggs by chickens with red earlobes.
• Air Cell: a pocket of air formed on the thick end of the egg after it is layed, due to the sudden drop in temperature. The air cell increases in size the older an egg is; this is the reason old eggs, when placed in water, stand straight up or float.
• Shell Membranes: a thin double membrane designed to prevent bacterial infection. The air cell forms between the two.
• Thin Albumen: one of the surest indicators of a high-quality egg. This is the thin layer of albumen which is closest to the shell and shell membrane.
• Thick Albumen: a thicker albumen, containing most of the protein and riboflavin in the egg. In low quality eggs, it tends to spread and mix with the thin albumen.
• Yolk: the golden treasure, the best part of the egg! This is the embryo, which, if fertilized and properly incubated, will develop into a hatchling. The richness of the yellow depends on the quality and type of feed. Almost all the egg's vitamins, minerals, and fat are contained in the yolk.
• Vitelline: a thin membrane separating the yolk from the albumen.
• Chalazae: a thin, twisted, white strand which acts as a shock absorber, keeping the yolk in place in the center of the egg.

Of course, this is all pretty academic; why do we love eggs? Because they taste good, you ninny! Eggs are the jacks-of-all-trades of the culinary world; a simple egg, both the yolk and the egg white, can be used as the base for sauces and meringues, as a thickener, emulsifier, glaze, and countless other things. From the simple hard-boiled egg to the most magnificent Spanish Omelette, a few of the many uses of eggs culled from the nodegel:

A Good Egg | Ant Egg | Avgolemono (Egg Lemon Soup) | Bacon and Egg Sandwich | Bacon and Egg Toasted Sandwich | Baked Eggs with Ham and Sherry | blown egg | breakfast sandwich | brown eggs | Cascarones | Chau Ahn Huang: Stir-Fried Egg Yolks | Chau Yep Ahn: Tea Eggs | chicken omelet | Coddled Eggs, Crumpets and Blackened Tomatoes | cooking eggs, chicken and pork | Crisp-cased Egg Tarts (Yaknow, DMan's recipes were actually pretty good) | deep fried eggs mousseline | deviled eggs | Easter egg | Easy skillet frittata | Egg (you are here) | egg burrito | Egg Drop (blasphemous) | Egg Drop Soup | Egg Flower Soup | egg foo yung | egg generation | egg in a microwave oven | egg in the hole | egg mayo | egg mcmuffin | egg nebula | egg sandwich | Egg Toastie | Egg Tofu | Egg Tree | Eggs Benedict | Eggs and tomatoes | Eggy Bread | Faberge Egg | fresh eggs | fried bread and eggs | fried egg sandwich | fried eggs | frittata | Green Eggs | Green Eggs and Ham | hard boiled egg | Hot Tomato Soup With An Egg Sandwich | How to Crack an Egg with one Hand | how to find out if an egg has gone bad, or How to tell if an egg is rotten | How to make an Omelette | How to separate eggs | I love eggs | Jing don: steamed eggs | leek and sweetcorn frittata | Morel omelet | My Omelette | Okonomiyaki (Japanese Omelette) | omelet | omelette | Ovum | Palm sugar and coriander omelette | pickled eggs | pint of stout with an egg in it | poached eggs | rotten eggs | Scotch Egg: or, How to Enjoy Life | Scottish Egg on a Stick | Scrambled Eggs, a.k.a. Eggs Dinah | Scrabbed eggs (recipe from Webster. Who knew?) | Scrambled eggs and onion on toast with garlic mushrooms | Scrambled eggs super! | Scrambled Eggs a la Sellafield | Shallow-fried Pancake Rolls with Eggs | Skillet eggs with andouille (wish I could find Andouille sausage somewhere) | soft boiled egg | spaghetti omelette | Spanish Omelette (or, properly, Tortilla, Tortilla Espaņola, ktl.) | Stracciatella alla Romana | Stracciatella (herb and egg soup) | suck eggs | sunny side up | sunshine egg | teach your grandmother how to suck eggs | the egg council | THE Egg Salad Sandwich | The history of easter eggs | Thousand year eggs | Through the Looking Glass - Chapter 6 | Tomato and Onion Omelette with Smoked Duck and Truffles | tuna and egg salad | Vegetarian Eggs | western eggs

Have I perhaps forgotten something? Did I overlook your beautifully and lovingly written egg node? Please /msg me, and I'll add it to the list.

Storing Eggs

Regrigerated eggs last about three to four weeks in their shells, although it is recommended to use them within seven to ten days to avoid unwanted bacterial infection. The integrity of an egg is severely compromised when it is removed from its shell. Eggs refrigerated without shells last only three to four days. This is because of the quick rate at which egg yolks become rotten. Separating the yolks from the egg whites allows one to refrigerate the yolks for three to four days and the whites for up to a week.

Freezers unlock the potential to store eggs for up to an entire year. Freezing eggs in their shells is simply out of the question. When frozen, egg yolks expand to the point that their shells would crack. This leaves two acceptable methods of freezing eggs: beaten or unbeaten. Unbeaten eggs should be stored in small quantities of one or two eggs in a Ziploc bag. If they were stored in greater quantities, the purpose of leaving the eggs intact would become obsolete. Beaten eggs are appropriate for the cases where many eggs are to be cooked at once. Beaten eggs may be frozen in either Ziploc bags or plastic, Tupperware containers.

Thawing becomes the next question concerning long-term egg storage. The best way to thaw frozen eggs is simply to return them to the refrigerator until completely thawed. Two to three tablespoons of thawed, beaten egg is the equivalent of one egg. To help the thawing process, sugar or salt may be added to the beaten egg mixture before freezing. A teaspoon of sugar (for sweet dishes) or salt (for main dishes) per cup of egg will suffice to keep the yolk from gelatinating.

How do you like your eggs? There are so many different and delicious ways to cook and serve eggs that they have become a staple of many diets the world over. They became popular in the height of the British Empire after being introduced into Great Britain by the Zulu warrior king Cetewayo in 1879, and thereafter spread to the British colonies all across the globe. But where do eggs come from? As any parent will tell you, sooner or later there comes a time when a child will look up, his eyes full of curiosity, and demand to know the answer to this question! What would you tell him? The answer is, of course, a hen's arse, but do you know the full story behind the fascinating journey made by an egg before it even reaches your table? I take my six year-old son to visit a small farm in the countryside near where we live and ask Fred Marmite, the farmer, this very question.

"A hen's arse," Fred tells me bluntly. I ask him to elaborate somewhat, and he kindly shows us around the barn where he keeps his battery hens trapped inside row upon row of tiny cages. As my son and I take a stroll along the st