Soft-boiled eggs are my preferred way of eating eggs. A little butter, salt and pepper on top and toast for dippage.
There’s no physical reaction that would make your ears ache from a soft-boiled egg. Much more likely is a simple coincidence, a psychosomatic reaction or a false memory. The fact that you’ve never had a soft-boiled egg again also destroys your case as anyone on the Straight Dope should know that replication is absolutely necessary to establish certain knowledge.
You eat **hot **hard-boiled eggs?!? :eek:
I was going to post that, as a child, I was given soft boiled eggs when I was sick (they were considered easy to keep down) and never used an egg cup. They were served in a bowl.
After seeing the two quoted posts and doing some googling I realize that what I was being given (and what my mother called soft boiled) may have been poached. I’m not positive about that since I don’t recall seeing them prepared.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen an egg cup other than in pictures. I think I assumed they were a fancy schmancy way of serving hard boiled eggs - more of a presentation thing - and you’d remove the egg to eat it.
Counterpoint: There’s no need to peel hard-boiled eggs whatsoever. You just put them in an egg cup, cut the top off with a knife and eat them with a spoon. Food, belleh; belleh, food. It couldn’t be easier, if you’ve got the right equipment. Of course if you haven’t got the right equipment then you end up having to do something ludicrous, like roll a hot egg over a plate and then pick fragments of peel off while burning your fingers. But what need when the right tool has been available for over a hundred years?
Soft-boiled eggs, like all food, need to be cooked properly I grant you. But it’s not hard. Put eggs in room-temperature water. Bring to boil. Boil for three minutes. That is literally it. Boiled eggs have to be the simplest cooked food in existence. Just because it’s British, doesn’t mean there’s a ceremony attached.
Canadian here. I grew up eating soft boiled eggs from an egg cup. I even still have I have egg cups. They don’t see a lot of use, but now I have a hankering for eggs and soldiers, so perhaps they will come out of hiding from the back of the cupboard soon.
In a pinch, a shot glass will do, but they don’t cuddle the egg the way a proper egg cup does.
Same here. But I’ve neither eaten nor even seen such a thing in many decades. Although, I’m not certain about that last sentence. Poached eggs, maybe, but not soft boiled.
Now the thread has me curious about the appearances of egg cups in US TV and movies, and was about to do some googling to search for that when it occurred to me to see if the US unpopularity of egg cups ever had a thread on the dope. And of course it did. In 2006.
As a young anglophile with a special love for transferware, I provided myself with half a dozen secondhand Spode egg cups, and crocheted half a dozen twee egg cozies.
I have never once eaten an egg out of them. Sorry.
I assure you, there **is **such a reaction in my case. I’ve felt it many times, and some form of raw egg was always involved: soft-boiled, sunny-side up with runny yolks, whipped egg whites (used to make meringue), Orange Julius–type drinks, cake batter, probably other stuff I’ve mercifully forgotten.
I don’t even have to know beforehand that there’s raw egg in what I’m ingesting. I can tell immediately from the reaction.
My elder daughter reports having the same reaction too. The only way to get that horrible slimy feeling out of your Eustachian tubes is to dry-gargle and honk in a manner reminiscent of Felix Unger clearing his sinuses.
Yes they do. Americans on the other hand, don’t.
(Hey, I hate soft-boiled eggs. But I also believe that anybody who puts as much work into frying an egg as Americans do is doing it wrong. Brits even fry them “with lace”).
My main use of hardboiled eggs is as a cold snack.
I’ve never eaten a soft boiled egg or used an egg cup (although I’m familiar with the idea of egg cups) but I have a question:
This idea of cutting the top of the egg shell off with a knife…doesn’t that get you bits of egg shell in your yolk and whatnot? When I peel a hard-boiled egg, I crack the whole thing all over and peel the shell off with the membrane, ideally in as few pieces as possible. Doesn’t the knife thing just shatter the shell into a bunch of shards?
That may not be the best example since that breakfast was served by a visiting British butler who was such a stereotype of a fastidious Englishman that he may have brought the cups with him.
Oh holy crap, yes I do. Have you ever had a warm or hot hard-boiled egg? It’s REALLY good. To the point that Mr. Athena and I have taken to putting cold hard-boiled eggs in the microwave to warm them before eating.
I used egg cups in the 1970s as a child. I occasionally use them now, but I’m more likely to scoop out the soft boiled egg whole from the shell into a bowl, and eat it like that (almost like a poached egg). I do have a small assortment of egg cups at home.
I love soft boiled eggs, but never used or had an egg cup. We just used a pedestaled shot glass when I was a kid. I now just use a regular shot glass, since I don’t own any pedestal ones.
This is how a master does it:
Sure there is. When I make hardboiled eggs, it’s often to slice or chop them for use in some other dish. For example sliced in a lettuce salad, or chopped to make egg salad. That’s not done in England?
Yes, to be fair. But Johnny LA seemed to be talking about eating hot hardboiled eggs by themselves. In which case the eggcup is your friend.
And I’m telling you you need to up the scientific rigor of this examination. Humanity is rife with examples of people just as convinced as you of some quirky reaction to food or environmental factors, that turn out to not be real. It’s very possible to build up the conviction you apparently possess without an actual physical reaction existing, due to well known cognitive biases.