Coddled Eggs

Not long after dinosaurs roamed the earth I bought an egg coddler. I had a brand new baby and a husband flying in C-130 Hercules transport planes. The aircrews had been stretched with medical evacuations, search and rescues and exercises, leaving the squadron with cranky, unhappy wives and grizzling children bringing up the rear.

Then out of nowhere, to calm the mutiny, came an invitation for the wives to go on a 'jolly'. Now this could not happen today as the scrutiny, accountability, insurance etc would make such a trip prohibitive. However, in the shadow of the fossilised footprints of the dinosaur this was still possible. 

A day training flight was set up to go to Norfolk Island and back with a stopover of a couple of hours on the island itself. The husbands were dispatched to stay at home and mind the children and, knowing that Norfolk Island was a duty free stop we, the nearly mutineers, bulked up the wallets and flew off to Norfolk. 

We returned in the early evening after a, hopefully, productive and educational training flight for the aircrew. I was greeted by a husband carrying a baby who had apparently had reflux all day. One of my duty free purchases was a Royal Worcester egg coddler that I bought to make coddled eggs for the reflux one. I am reasonably certain that until this very morning I never used the egg coddler. I found it in a cupboard yesterday, took it out of its box, read the instructions and decided to coddle an egg this morning. It's not a hard thing to do and hardly a recipe.

Coddled Egg

Butter to grease the inside of the coddler

1 egg

Chopped parsley and chives

Teaspoon of cream (optional)

Salt and pepper

Toast

Butter the inside of the coddler. Crack your egg and put it into the coddler. Top with some of the parsley and chives and then the cream if using.

Put the coddler, with its lid now on, into a pot of boiling water up to the neck of the coddler and boil, not too violently, for 7-8 minutes. Remove from the pot, unscrew the lid, add salt and pepper to taste and serve with toast.

There are recipe variations of course and I will try a few to see if it worth my while hitting ebay to buy some more coddlers. I do see them in charity shops sometimes and I will probably snap them up. Coddled eggs would make a fine appearance at a brunch - thinking smoked fish or pancetta, mushroom or even using them to go down the chawan-mushi Japanese route. It took me 35 years but I just knew I would need the coddler one day.