The Everyday, Anytime Egg-Combination Generator

Sometimes, while spending a hour finely slicing vegetables for soup or kneading a dough, or specifically, whipping a meringue to make ice cream, mousse, or, more-or-less, any dessert I actually make, I muse on how so many dishes couldn’t exist without the unique white-and-yolk properties of eggs. Or rather, it’s precisely because we have eggs and the work the way they do that we have these dishes in the first place; and if chickens popped out some entirely different foodstuff, our culinary traditions would be rather different, because they would have been based on the properties of this other thing, rather than the egg. It is indeed incredible, and edible.Mark Bittman muses,

You know that eggs are simple, almost infinitely useful; these are clichés I can barely bring myself to repeat. That people have trouble embracing them — this is perpetually baffling. Part of this perception problem comes from the cholesterol scare of a generation ago, from which we’ve barely recovered…Part comes from a general fear of food: for many of us, the natural state of the egg is a McMuffin; a raw egg demands more of a commitment. The egg-combination generator is a way of dealing with some of these issues….If you can cook an egg, you can cook breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks — not only for yourself but for almost anyone else. There are things that turn people off at different times of day, but unless you’re a vegan, an egg is not likely to be one of them.

Go check out the flow chart at The New York Times Magazine