Where Are the Egg Cups?
Easter got us to thinking about eggs (Obviously) but not the chocolate kind this time, but rather the soft-boiled variety. A soft-boiled egg with “Soldiers’ is one of life’s little luxuries and can definitely evoke many blessed childhood memories for many Europeans and Australians.
To confirm, a “Soldier” is a thin strip of toasted bread, slightly thicker than your finger and buttered at the end. These shapes are supposed to remind you of soldiers on parade. The reason for the shape is so it can be dipped into a soft-boiled egg that has had the top of its shell removed.
The popularity of the phrase “Boiled Eggs with Soldiers “seems to have come from a 1965 UK TV Commercial for eggs starring Tony Hancock and Patricia Hayes, but we are sure it’s origin goes way further back than that.
Easy enough to make the soldiers and obviously eggs are in plentiful supply, but what about the egg cup used to hold the soft-boiled egg? America as a nation love eggs, fried, poached, omelets, over easy, over hard, but don’t really use egg cups.
In the novel by Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, wars were fought between political factions who divided themselves along the lines of “Little Endians” who broke their boiled eggs at the small end and “Big Endians” who broke their boiled eggs at the larger end, what they would have made of the short supply of egg cups and the lack of being able to bring the noble soft boiled egg to its full soldier dipping potential is unfathomable.
Join us and start the revolution now!
