I see words, they look like English, but… wat?
A Clockwork Orange references. 
Salmonella killed soft boiled eggs in the US.
Or rather, the fear of it, fueled by a couple headline-grabbing incidents of industrial-scale stupidity, such as thousands of people nationwide being sickened after bulk ice cream ingredients were transported in tank trucks that had not been cleaned after transporting raw eggs.
Back in the 1990s, some states (California and New Jersey come to mind, probably others as well) passed laws that restaurants could not serve raw or undercooked eggs. Raw is obvious, but what’s undercooked? According to the American Egg Board current guidelines eggs should be cooked until the whites and yolks are firm. AFAIK, these laws have been revoked, but we still have an entire generation believing that runny eggs will make them deathly ill.
I gather were not talking about training bras?
I think soft boiled eggs were on a decline in America well before the salmonella alarms went off. In the 50s and 60s you ate them when you were sick as already noted, or saw grandma or grandpa eating them. And as you can tell from this thread no one had egg cups.
There was an episode of Two and a Half Men where Alan had moved out of Charlie’s house and in with his mother that had them eating eggs out of egg cups. It annoyed his mother when Alan was cracking the egg.
I was gonna say the only set I’ve seen was in Grandma’s cupboard, but I never saw them used.
I’m American, but me mum was a WWII British war-bride (Dad was a U.S. 8th Army Air Force fly-boy stationed at Honington air base). So, I know all about egg cups and toasted “soldiers” (I could wipe out an entire brigade of those buttery strips slathered in yolk, in my youth).
I now prefer poached eggs on toast (with or without Hollandaise), but those egg cups and soldiers bring back fond memories. Mum introduced me to many English delights: warm Birds Custard on gingerbread, mixed grill, jam tarts, sausage pastries, Yorkshire pudding, bubble & squeak…
I should have died 20 years ago from hyperlipidemia, but I suppose my English DNA is too stubborn to sucumb.
I vaguely remember seeing egg cups in one or two old children’s books I had as a child. I assumed they were a real thing but a really old-fashioned thing, one of those weird customs from a hundred years ago.
That might be the instance I was thinking of.
Meanwhile, the controversy has spilled over into another site I follow.
ISTM that one contributing factor in the US is that we refrigerate our eggs. This has been discussed a lot, but it boils down to how US eggs are processed to go to market. The cleaning process removes a natural coating that then requires refrigeration. This is not done outside of the US, allowing the eggs to be stored at room temperature.
This makes the timing of cooking soft boiling somewhat more troublesome in the US. Outside of the US, the eggs begin at room temperature so the timing of the cooking is easier to manage. Whereas starting with a refrigerated egg? Do we let it sit out to get to room temp? How long? Oh, bother. (Thanks for the recipe, teela!)
I believe this has contributed to the decline in serving soft boiled eggs in the US, and the disappearance of eggs cups from earlier generations.
We keep our eggs (from our hens) on the counter. When our hens take a break in the winter, I find the cold eggs from the grocery store cook differently enough to be noticeable.
Was it Max & Ruby? I remember twenty some years ago reading those books to my daughter. “Bad egg, said Max. Good egg said Ruby”. Over and over and over.
Heh. That’s the hilarious part, right? There are folks talking up a specialized item to help people dip buttered stuff into this here fatty source of cholesterol – and it’s the Americans who are saying, “uh, no, thanks; we’ll pass.”
Ditto, and question: Do Brits eat eggs all these ways too, or is one or more of them as foreign to them as soft-boiled is to us Americans?
(By the way, England: you can keep your egg cups and your beans for breakfast—we have biscuits and gravy!)
Uh, no, we regularly “dip buttered stuff into this here fatty source of cholesterol,” we just don’t need a single-purpose item with which to do it.
Pretty much, although popular culture tells me that you lot have a lot more ways to describe a fried egg than we do.
I’ve just recently taken up soft-boiled eggs as an easier alternative to poaching (at least when doing more than one) and normally I just peel them and serve on toast. However, the other day I was wishing I had an egg cup, and discovered that I had a wide shot glass that fit just fine.
I don’t think that unrefrigerated eggs are the norm outside of the U.S., at least in Germany eggs are always kept in the fridge. And I don’t think that makes much of a difference anyway if you boil eggs the usual way it’s done here: heat water to boiling point, take egg out of the fridge, (now the next step is important, it keeps the egg from cracking) prick a hole into the flat side of the egg with a device like this with the funny name of Eierpicker (I doubt that you have those, not even having egg cups and all, but rest assured, they belong in every German household), put egg into the boiling water and let simmer for you’re preferred time (you’ll learn you’re time in childhood), accounting for size of the egg.
I do like the occasional soft-boiled egg, but haven’t really mastered making them. Starting temp and egg size variations, probably, though I don’t cook them often enough to say for sure.
I will probably make them more often if I ever finish putting together the sous vide cooker I’ve been meaning to assemble for some time. Should be able to do them absolutely perfect, every single time.
WTF? Who cooks eggs like that?
That’s the strangest thing I’ve never known about.
Eggs here go into cold water and get boiled for the requisite time: about 4 minutes for soft.