If anyone were to call on Tom and me, late on a Saturday morning, they might think we had regressed to the nursery. Not for us bagels or pain au chocolat from the nearby deli. First breakfast with the early-morning coffee remains toast with marmalade or lemon curd, but the second breakfast, or early lunch, is a boiled egg with soldiers of granary toast, sea salt and coarsely ground black pepper. It is an uncommonly good egg too, a tough shell, with a creamy white and sunshine-yellow yolk.
This passion for eggs outlasts any ‘salmonella in a sandwich’ story. I came home one evening to find some eggs had been delivered for me to try, and Tom had already used several of them to make scrambled eggs for his lunch. Not the way I make scrambled eggs; he likes them with a little milk. ‘I’m never going to eat another egg,’ he proclaimed, ‘unless I can eat these.’
