Great passage from the EB White essay!
“I suspect there is a more plausible explanation for the popularity of the white egg in America. I ascribe the whole business to a busy little female —the White Leghorn hen. She is nervous, she is flighty, she is the greatest egg‐machine on two legs, and it just happens that she lays a white egg. She’s never too distracted to do her job. A Leghorn hen, if she were on her way to a fire, would pause long enough to lay an egg. This endears her to the poultrymen of America, who are out to produce the greatest number of eggs for the least money paid out for feed. Result: much of America, apart from New England, is. flooded with white eggs.”
His article was written in 1971 but I found a 2018 website saying “The white Leghorn hen is a firm favorite of the industrial poultry concerns.”
And here’s a breed that lays green eggs:
When I was a kid, back in the 50s, we got all our eggs from a local farmer. All his chickens were free-range with identical diet, and we always got a mix of brown and white eggs. There was no difference in taste.
We do know our eggs. Given the same diet, there’s no difference. If the eggs from your in-laws hens tasted better it’s because they probably fed them a decent diet and no question they were fresh.
In a blind taste test you can’t tell the difference.
I recall, when I was a kid, reading somewhere, possibly a Reader’s Digest, about a wealthy man who complimented his cook for going to the trouble of always obtaining perfect brown eggs for his breakfast. In reality her lifelong efficiency trick had been to boil the eggs in the pot she used to make the coffee.
I’m sure she was African American but perhaps not. It seems it may be a Lebanese recipe.
Chicken hobbyists have developed breeds that lay eggs that are all different colors, from chocolate brown to pure white and everything in between. Bringing in Auracana genetics, a South American breed which lays blue eggs, we now have olive, green, and blue-green egg layers readily available from hatcheries and feed stores for home flocks. They all taste the same if fed the same.
