Somebody (possibly the Astronomer Royal) decreed the egg a perfect food. Who am I to disagree? Many people think of them with the same fondness as Izaak Walton did strawberries. He quotes a certain Dr Boteler this way, concerning this berry’s relationship to perfection:
Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, ‘Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.’
You can find plenty of dieticians ready to battle over the nature of an egg’s cholesterol. And whether it is the good or bad sort. To say nothing of whether it matters a jot if you eat about an egg a week.
So I plan to put eggs in my road trip picnic basket. But not a lot of them. I’ll tell you why in another yarn from the past I’ll call “Should We Swap Plates?”
What you ordered looks better!
Unless you always dine all by your lonesome and merely gaze about the restaurant at neighboring plates, you’ve doubtless experienced Plate Envy.
This is what Tim and I called the occasional impulse to cry, “Ooh, that looks so much better than what I ordered!” when the waiter delivers a pair of plates to the table. In my experience, it happens mostly to spouses/significant others. I sometimes experience Plate Envy when a table-mate orders a beautiful ‘salade composee’ while I selected a Caesar with chicken. Or when someone’s cocktail off the Bartender’s Specials list is so spectacular as to outweigh the fact it’s made with spirits and liqueurs I would ordinarily run a mile from. Ditto a perfect Napoleon or a tower of brownie-cake and cheesecake, replete with raspberries, for dessert.
This story is not exactly about Plate Envy. The dishes involved were a quite simple crepe, filled with ham and cheese, and an omelet — probably filled quite similarly. But who should have ordered which? And would the choices have differed if all parties had a better command of French?
A detour through the Loire Valley
You see, Timothy and I had travelled to France for the 1989 Bicentenaire. This marked the 200th anniversary of the attack on the prison of the Bastille, which gave France Bastille Day and aristocrats a pain in the neck. Like any touristes, we purchased souvenirs. Some of them we even drank (although not this fine, exceptionally artistic and cheap example. That price is in francs, not euros. And in 1989 francs at that.)
We took the long way from Bayeux and the beachheads of Normandy to Paris: we went south to pick up the River Loire, to see chateaux and castles I’d seen as a teenager. After one particularly long day’s drive, we landed in Angers on a Sunday night. Those who know your French (culinary) history will perhaps know that jolly little is open on a Sunday night at 21.00 hours.
I’m 99 percent sure we dined at a creperie that still exists (now known as Chez Pont-Pont) beside the battlements of Anjou Castle. Those walls fill my mind’s eye when I think about that meal. There were little electric lights overhead, and a buzz of scooters and 2CVs in the quiet side street. We shared a bottle of the local white wine, perhaps a Saumur from a neighboring district. Once the wine arrived, and a petite salade to share, we ordered our main courses.
I ordered the omelet because I’d been devouring Elizabeth David’s splendid collection of essays titled An Omelet and a Glass of Wine. I thought such a meal seemed so French, and in David’s view, so light and palatable. Timothy was game for a crepe: we had eaten them often in bistros in London, and it was after all a house specialitie. The plats looked so enticing — the omelet and the crepe so large they spilled over the sides of our plates. They tasted delicious. We swapped bites but were content for once with what we’d each ordered.
The grande plan backfires
It was all very delicious at the time. And the warmth of the stones, and our exhaustion, seemed perfect to send us off to sleep soundly, in a modern, air-conditioned Accor hotel nearby. At around 2 a.m., I woke up with the kind of digestive upset that reminds me why I eat eggs only for breakfast. (I’m not, strictly speaking, allergic to eggs, but they disagree with me quite unpredictably. I eat them early in the day so any lingering effects have many hours to wear off.) As I crept from the bathroom as quietly as I could, Tim called out that he, too, was awake, and didn’t feel so well…
When I turned on the light, I saw his face, back and chest were red and swollen with hives. The crepe was made of buckwheat flour. Tim’s buckwheat allergy was well-known to us both; the menu may have named the type of flour used, but not such that my language skills could detect it. Cold compresses. Benadryl. A paracetamol for each of us. Evian water in litres. We held hands in the dark, and mourned the fact that had I ordered the crepe, and Tim the omelet, we’d both be sleeping like les enfants. By sunrise, we felt more dead than alive, but the key point was, we were both alive.
As I recall, we planned to tour the Tour Angers that day and go onwards to Tours by way of Azay-le-Rideau. We made it to Tours and collapsed in our hotel beds as soon as we could reach our rooms. I believe we ate soup and bread and beer for dinner, and doubled back to Azay the next day. Never again did Timothy eat a foreign-language crepe, nor I an egg after 11 a.m.