It’s hard to imagine modern life and modern eating without certain specific foods. At least, Western eating.
My vote for the single most versatile, key, important, and overall delicious and fabulous food/ingredient we have is the egg. It is key to the widest range of foods and plus I just LOVE eggs and everything they contribute to.
I was going to make this a poll, but I couldn’t think of anything else that even comes close. If you have a candidate that you believe surpasses the egg, please share.
Eggs make the following dishes and meals possible:
Fried, poached, scrambled eggs all by themselves
omelettes
fritattas
quiches
I think this is not a question that will give a singular best answer, but in my opinion, there is an ingredient that can at least qualify as being as versatile as eggs:
Milk.
Milk gives us butter, creams, cheeses (almost a food group in its own right), yoghurts, buttermilk, lactose-acid soft drinks, and milk sugars. And that’s just the types of food or drink where milk is the overwhelming majority of the components. If you include the more derivative recipes, the only competing ingredient that comes to mind quickly is grains - wheat and rice in particular which by the way work very well with milk in many recipes.
Milk is key mostly for the cheese. And cheese is indeed a major food (see my thread on cheese!) But I don’t think either milk or cheese is as critically important to as many different types of dishes as eggs, simply because of the jobs that eggs do and are capable of doing.
The amazing nature of eggs, both whites and yolks, together and apart, means that eggs are irreplaceable in a huge percentage of the huge number of foods they contribute to. The way eggs contribute structure and texture to foods simply can’t be replicated by non-egg substitutes. If you doubt that, try eating vegan for very long and tell me you don’t miss them!
Salt was my first thought; corn is my second. Not only is corn made into obvious stuff like corn chips and corn meal, it’s the source of corn syrup and corn oil as well as the biodiesel that transports our food so far, and a lot of the plastic products it’s packaged in so that it can travel.
Plus, it’s animal feed. I know that more and more feed is soy, but plenty is still corn.
When I saw the thread title I thought instantly of eggs. I made my banana pancakes last week and forgot the egg. They were meh. Then I made them yesterday with the egg and they were so yummy.
Yet another vote for salt. It’s not a main ingredient in anything, but its necessary in both sweet and savory dishes, and its presence or absence can literally make or break a dish in terms of taste.
Well, I give you salt, but I was thinking more of actual food, vs. seasoning.
Corn is major, but as far as food alone, it wouldn’t be missed the way eggs would be. Even if you don’t like eggs much for themselves, if they were suddenly deleted from everything you eat, you’d notice. Bigtime. Like Zjestika’s pancakes.
