Eggstreme London
How do you like your eggs? A short history of the London pickled egg
On an eggceptionally sunny day in August just past I made the, in hindsight, cracking decision to drop into a small, dark and dank London pub on a Lambeth side street, as one does having built up a furious thirst traipsing through this fabulous city.
Upon standing at the bar awaiting a refreshing G&T, to my Antipodean delight I spied the above perchedincongruously and cockily just aft of the London Pride beer tap. What the hell was it? I was immediately reminded of the formaldehyde-soaked floating body parts stored meticulously in the jars of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons at Lincoln’s Inn Fields (a fave hang out of mine).
Quite frankly I was all at once amazed, horrified and overjoyed to realise it was none other than the pickled egg, immortalised in the English literature I read as a kid and anaesthetised in what looked to be malt vinegar. Hideous but compelling at the same time.
Upon further investigation, it appears that the pickled egg is not just a survivor of Victorian England, but was being consumed by the Germans and the Dutch as far back as the 1700s.
Introduced to the Americas at about the same time, this tradition of narrowly avoiding botulism appears to be a past-time of many Europeans, not just the British. And as much as I had wanted to confidently report that the whole egg in vinegar trend passed Australians thankfully by, a quick google search returned an alarming number of Australian sites boasting themes on the pickled egg recipe. See SBS’s pink pickled egg recipe here.
So, bolstered by the warm day, the maxim “When in Rome…” (or as it turns out, Stuttgart, Amsterdam or Byron Bay) and my second G&T, I helped myself to the contents of that canopic jar and gulped one of those embolisms down.
Do I regret it? Every single caking, powdery, sour moment of it. The yolk of a pickled egg has the unfortunate habit of glueing itself to the upper palate and forcing itself down the fast closing throat in the same way as your regular everyday hard boiled egg. And it in no way tastes as good.
Would I do it again? Not on your nelly. However I feel that my eggsperiment added a certain piquancy to my afternoon wanderings through London.
Do you know there was actually a street called the Pickled Egg Walk in London named after the Pickled Egg tavern which sat on it and in which the owner concocted tasty pickled egg recipes? Unfortunately it wasn’t the pub I was imbibing in that day, but it was satisfyingly close enough.
For more good reading on London click here.
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