Beneath the round, simple, crunchy shell lies a multitude of nutrients, and the yolk has so much nutrition that it could support a living, breathing creature.
No matter what kind of egg it is, egg, ostrich egg, crocodile egg, penguin egg .... Most eggs look pretty much the same, except for differences in color and size, and they all have round, smooth, brittle shells that contain endless life.
In ancient legends and myths from all over the world, including Egypt, India, and Greece, life bursts forth from within the lifeless eggshell.
The egg has become a symbol of the origin of life.
The egg we see everywhere today? , still the egg mentioned in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the Indian Rig Veda. The difference is that our most common egg, the egg, is now an industrialized product.
As the leading egg in the global market, the egg is nutritious and inexpensive, and other avian eggs, such as duck eggs, are now not uncommon, but still not as common as the egg.
Eggs in the kitchen are even more varied, and eggs can be boiled, scrambled, fried, baked, grilled, pickled, fermented, and other production procedures.
Through the hands of the chef, they are transformed into rich soups; smooth sauces; solid breads and pastries; candies and ice creams to enhance the taste; and full-bodied, sweet custard sauces. ...... Eggs add luster to foods, make wines and meats purer and tastier, and add more flavor and nutrition.
From children to the elderly, as long as they are not allergic, they need to get protein and other nutrients from eggs in their daily lives.
Egg? s origin
Eggs appeared almost a billion years before the oldest birds.
The taxonomic genus Chicken is only 8 million years old, and chickens have only been around for about 3-4 million years.
The eggs of the first animals were born in the ocean, where the outer membrane of the egg can be quite simple and the food supply as long as minimal.
Around 300 million years ago, reptiles, the earliest fully terrestrial animals, developed eggs that were self-sufficient.
These eggs had a tough shell that retained moisture and kept them alive, and contained enough food to feed the embryo through the long process of developing to full size.
Hundreds of millions of years later, the eggs of primitive reptiles were modified by evolution to produce animal and bird eggs. The hard, mineralized shells of these eggs are highly insulating, allowing the embryo to continue to develop in the driest of habitats, and have a range of antimicrobial properties.
These changes have made bird eggs the ideal human food, containing a high level of balanced animal nutrition, well-packaged, and able to be preserved for weeks with little effort.
In 1500 BC, the chicken, the mother of today's most widely available eggs, entered Sumer and Egypt, and arrived in Greece around 800 BC, where it became known as the "Persian bird". The main source of eggs in the region at that time was quail.
As birds go, chickens are about as common as it gets. Most birds, including chickens, lay eggs all the time, and a few lay only a fixed number of eggs at a time.
Birds like chickens will keep laying eggs until a certain number of eggs accumulate in the nest. If an egg is taken away, the hen lays another one to replace it, and so on throughout her life.
Chickens can lay far more eggs than birds that are rationed.
The direct ancestor of the chicken is the jungle fowl, which was native to tropical and subtropical Southeast Asia and India, and was domesticated in Southeast Asia around 7500 BC.
The wild Indian jungle fowl is known to lay a clutch of about 12 brown eggs at a time, several times a year.
Chickens have long been domesticated by humans and have become a household name for nutritional supplements. Both chicken meat and eggs were rare in times of scarcity.
From 1850-1900, the chicken underwent an unprecedented evolution. Following the start of British diplomacy with China, a large and magnificent Chinese breed, the Cochin, was introduced, leading to a wave of chicken farming and poultry show fashions.
As this bird-watching craze subsided, laying hens and broilers became the dominant breeds. Today's laying hens and broilers are the offspring of the purebred chickens of the time.
Today's typical laying hen is born in an incubator, eats a configured diet, lives in a wire cage and under lights, lays for about a year, and produces about 250-290 eggs.
These chickens become veritable egg-laying machines.
Eggs
A hen uses 1/4 of her daily calorie intake to make eggs, a duck 1/2. Each egg is about 3% of the hen's body weight, and over the course of a year, she lays 8 times her body weight in eggs.
Hens have only one ovary and are born with thousands of tiny germ cells.
Eggs start out as pinhead-sized white disks clinging to the yolk, which is the most important end of the egg, the living germ cells containing the hen's chromosomes.
As the hen grows, the germ cells grow to a size of a few millimeters in diameter and, over 2-3 months, accumulate into the white yolk prototype in the membrane that encases them. The white yolk can be seen in a fully cooked poached egg.
At various stages thereafter, different egg cells begin to mature and do not reach full maturity until around the 10th week, when the germ cells begin to rapidly accumulate yellow yolk, mostly fat and protein synthesized in the hen's liver.
The goal of the yolk is almost exclusively to supply nutrition. The yolk accounts for 3/4 of the calories in the whole egg and most of the iron, vitamin B, and vitamin A.
The yellow color in the yolk comes from a plant pigment called lutein. Hens get this pigment primarily from alfalfa and corn feed.
Duck egg yolks are a darker orange, which gets its color from beta-carotene and the red pigment, lutein. Mallards get these nutrients from small aquatic insects and crustaceans, while laying ducks get them from feed additives.
Finally, the finished egg yolk contains enough nutrients for the chick to grow on its own for the first 21 days.
So, like milk, the egg itself is a food designed to nurture life, providing energy until the new life can take care of itself.
It's just that over-industrialization will always make people uneasy, and that's why there's a difference between regular eggs and wood eggs.
After all, free-range hens originally ate a natural and varied diet of grains, leaves, and bugs, a diet heavy in nutrients that commercial mass-produced soybeans and feed could not provide.
In addition to this, mass rearing also increases salmonella contamination. Hens that have "failed to lay" are often processed to become feed for the next generation of laying hens, and in the process are susceptible to outbreaks of salmonella infection.
More and more people are willing to buy more expensive wild or farm-raised wood eggs.
As for the color of the eggshell, it is determined by the genetic background of the hen and has nothing to do with the taste or nutritional value of the egg.
Lai Heng hens lay pale "white" eggs; brown eggs are produced by breeds of chickens that were originally bred for both meat and eggs, such as the Rock Island Red and the Ruffed Grouse; and Chinese Crossbreed hens paint their eggs with delicate yellow dots.
There is also a Chilean Arokaner chicken that lays blue eggs, which comes from a dominant genetic trait unique to it. Mating an Arokaner with a chicken that lays brown eggs produces blue and brown pigmentation, hence the green eggshell.
In addition, eggs have an air chamber, the size of which can be used as an indicator of the freshness of the egg.
The reason for this is that about 25 hours after the egg leaves the ovary, the hen lets the blunt end of the egg come forward and lays a complete egg. The egg gradually cools down after leaving the warmer body temperature of the mother (41°C) and the contents shrink slightly.
This contraction separates the inner shell membrane from the outer shell membrane at the blunt end, creating an air chamber. The longer a laying egg sits, the smaller the air chamber becomes.
Eating:
Our ancient treatment of eggs was mostly salted and pickled, when eggs were a rare and nutritious food, and salted and pickled could preserve the spring abundance of eggs for consumption throughout the year.
Nowadays, boiled, fried and scrambled eggs are the main methods of preparation.
In the West, the recipes of Abyssius know that the Romans ate fried eggs, hard-boiled eggs, soft-boiled eggs, and patina, which experts believe may refer to a delicious savory egg pie or sweet custard sauce.
In the Middle Ages, the French began making delicate omelets, and in England, poached devilled eggs were flavored with sauces that came to be known as creme anglaise. The next three centuries saw the development of mayonnaise and whipped egg white foam.
By around 1900, the French chef Escoffier was able to make more than 300 egg dishes.
Recipes:
Halibut pan
Pat clean halibut and place in a shallow pan.
Pour in oil, fish sauce, and wine.
While cooking, grind the peppercorns, round leaf angelica, oregano, add some stock from the pot, and break in the raw egg, stirring to form a ball, pour over the halibut, and cook slowly.
When the fish is cooked, sprinkle some pepper and serve.
Cheese pot
Pour out the right amount of milk according to the size of the pot and add honey.
Add 5 eggs for 550 ml and 3 eggs for 275 ml. Mix this milk mixture well until it becomes one, strain and pour into a shallow pan and cook slowly.
Once cooked, sprinkle with pepper and serve.
Poche to Potage
Take the eggs and crack them into boiling water, cook them in the boiling water and remove them.
Stir the milk with the yolks, and put them into a saucepan;
add the sugar or honey, color with saffron, and bring to a boil;
as soon as it boils take it away from the boil, and sprinkle with powdered eight-ginger, and put the boiled egg on a plate to finish it off, and pour in the boiled sauce, and bring it out to the table.
-- Taken from the manuscript of Antiquitates Culinarioe, published in 1791 (about 1400)
Recommended reading:
The Complete Chicken Book
Food and Cookery
Practical Gastronomy
Deep Nutrition