Simple Spanish Fried Eggs

Being a clay pot collector, I was immediately attracted to a painting by Velázquez in which a solemn woman “of a certain age” is depicted poaching a pair of eggs in simmering olive oil in a deep cazuela while an equally solemn-looking boy waits nearby. British writer Tom Lubbock describes the painting thus: “Those eggs. . . are the only things that move. The bodies of the old woman and the boy are static. What looks like action is in fact a kind of mime. It is held as if for an old long-exp