How to Eat A Quail Egg.

[arcanamundi]

  

Pour fresh, cold water into a pot and turn the heat up to high. Open your tiny box of quail eggs. Count them: 18. Take out nine. They fit in the palm of your hand, tiny and brown-speckled, unique and perfect. Look at each one. Play favorites. This one is the prettiest. No, this one.

   

Carefully lay them down in the bottom of the saucepan, the water cool against your fingers. Scatter several pinches of the grey sea salt crystals into the pot and swirl them with your fingertips. The water on the bottom of the pot is warm now, and a scrim of soft looking air bubbles coat the surface. The water boils for a few minutes - three or four - set them aside to cool a little bit.

  

When they are cool enough to feel good in your hand instead of ow ow hot ow they are ready to eat.

Put them on a little plate with a teaspoon of the salt. Sit crosslegged on your bed with the plate on one knee. This is important. The table is too formal. Tap the egg on the plate, rolling it lightly to shatter the shell. The shell is thick, and amiable. It slides off on its membrane. The tiny hardboiled egg is the size of a thumbtip.

Now you have options: cut the egg in half and carefully place one or two of the salt crystals on the yolk, then eat while still warm and the yolk is all rich and melty. The smooth eggwhite, the light and fluffy yolk - the quail egg is both airy and substantial, satisfyingly eggy but not oily or greasy like many chicken eggs. Then cronch! goes the salt crystal. Yum.

Or dip them in the salt. But in my opinion, that's not enough control over the salt. I prefer to leave nothing up to chance, and choose the grains of salt that are the size of the teeny quartz pebbles that used to get stuck in the tread of your tennis shoes when you were little. Just right.

There is a meditative quality to peeling and eating the eggs like this. It is simple, but you have to think about it. You can't also think about your problems or your to-do list like you can with chicken eggs. We're talking about fine motor skills here. Concentrate.

These taste very good with hot tea.



Thanks, lady!

Comments

[double0hilly.livejournal.com]

I prefer quail to quail egg!!!! Mwahaha.

Actually, I see these little guys in grocery stores and always wonder how they're eaten and what they taste like. They remind me of Cadbury miniature eggs.

[arcana-mundi.livejournal.com]

I've saw lots of recipes for them while I was looking for pics - fried sunny side up and laid on toast; the hardboiled eggs halved and used instead of toast tips for caviar; hardboiled eggs halved in a spinach salad - they all look reallllly good.

I like their tininess and the fine texture of the yolk, and even most of all, the ratio of yolk to white (either even or more yolk than white, like it *should* be!)

Elyse Sewell posted something in one of her recent entries about roasted quail eggs being sold as street food in Hong Kong - the whole egg, and you pop it in your mouth it shell and all. She said they were *really* good.