King’s folly
I received a request of help for a TV shows: what about cooking eggs with Ambergris?
An English cook (are the 2 words compatible for a French man) “recreates” dishes from the past and the show “culminates in a lavish feast”.
I do not like at all the “lavish feast” part. I just returned from Africa and hold god given food in too high a respect for appreciating it being made a show of waste for the rich.
I have seen in all my years of travelling before becoming a perfumer that humanity is divided in 2 parts: one part has problems for eating, and the other part has problems for losing weight.
I am convinced that if someone is hungry on earth it is only because someone else is eating his dinner.
Nevertheless, a true perfumer is always a cook as well, and this English trip tickled my French man’s curiosity. I said to my daughters: today I cook something special, the egg with ambergris.
I cooked my egg putting it in a pan with a little bit of olive oil, then I grated some ambergris on it and I covered the pan and let cook at very low fire until appears a white layer over the egg (snowy fried eggs).
We ate the egg and it was as good as usual, being happy a egg from my own happy hens, but the ambergris flavour got completely lost in that dish, and we all were fully deluded.
If that was the dish of a king, it must have been an English king (this is only the opinion of a French man though).
I was so incredulous that I started all over again, with more ambergris and taking care of cooking the ambergris even less.
Well, it is not because I am French, but this English dish is a complete flop.
A good news anyway is that Ambergris eggs seem to loosen your bowels. Was the king constipated?
Still I am opened to another English culinary experience, if someone cares to counsel me something really special.
This is very funny! :-) And good point about the hungry of the world, who far outnumber the well fed and fat. Hmm…not even a whiff of caviar in this dish then? Too bad it was a disappointment. A waste of ambergris. As regards English cuisine I like Shepherd’s Pie, which I make in the winter in an old brown stoneware English dish (from a 2nd hand shop) that seems to *know* all by itself how to make this dish turn out well. It looks like a generation or two of Shepherd’s Pies have been baked in it. And English toffees are good, too.