The ones pictured of course, are Easter eggs.
Made with fresh chicken eggs.
Bright and colorful on the outside.
Hard-cooked yellow and white on the inside.
Considering colored eggs on this Easter Sunday - got me to thinking about
one thousand year old eggs.
AKA Century eggs.
Made with fresh (believe it or not) chicken eggs (or duck eggs?).
Greenish of yolk and gelatinous but firm amber colored egg white.
Slightly cheesy, sometimes mildly pungent.
Definitely odd-looking.
Euewwww, right?
Wrong.
Granted, thousand year old eggs are an acquired taste.
Truly, you almost have to have been raised with the concept and introduced
to the exotic flavor in tiny bites, getting used to it over time (read: years)(one thousand?)(HaHa) to appreciate the taste. They were a food staple in the kitchen and at the dinner table when I was growing up in San Francisco.
I enjoy them the way we used to back then - sliced up fine in jook (rice congee) or cut into wedges and served with Chinese-style pickled scallions and a little drizzle of oil.
Served up properly, thousand year old eggs are downright yummy. They are also an ingenious way to preserve an egg for a long while.
Albeit Weird.
If I didn't grow up eating them, I'd be very...very...wary.
2 comments:
OK... so the pictures in the link are not bad. They actually look quite beautiful, almost like glass art eggs. Now what I wanna know is who thinks these things up? Who? How did someone get the idea to say... humn lets see... wonder what would happen if I coated an egg in a salt, oak ashes, quicklime mix and let them sit for a few months? What do you suppose I would get? Would it preserve it? People sure were crafty back in the day.
Re: food preservation, I too have wondered 'who comes up with these ideas?!?'
1000 year old eggs would be at the top of the 'Huh?!?' list, for sure.
Ah - a true artiste!
He who sees the beauty in the gelatinous amber/ mossy green of the fermented egg...
I'm such the romantic that I've compared HubbyDear's eyes (in certain lighting) to the green yolk of the Century Egg - as in 'Darling, your eyes are the color of...'
;-)
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