The First Boiling

I eat my breakfast on the go these days. I'm a firm non-believer in fast food so at the beginning of each week I mix up a large bowl of fruit salad and hard boil nearly a dozen eggs. I put a single serving size container of fruit along with a banana and two eggs in an insulated bag every morning and spend what would otherwise be down time at red lights eating portions of my breakfast.

It was while I was hard boiling eggs this weekend that I got to wondering - who came up with the idea of hard boiling eggs in the first place?

I imagined a Cro-Magnun man breaking open an ostrich egg, wrinkling his lip in disgust as viscous, opaque fluid trickled down his forearms, and saying Matilda we need to figure out a better way of preparing these things.

Perhaps the first cooking attempt was to place the egg in the crook of a forked branch and hold it over newly discovered fire - only to have the branch burn through and the egg fall into the hot coals where it burned to a crisp.

Approach number two might have been to crack the egg open on a hot rock that formed part of the fire ring and wait for the egg to sizzle. While the ants and grubs that sizzled along with the egg might have provided an extra protein source, I imagine they might have upset Matilda's delicate stomach.

After those flawed attempts, it was probably in disgust that "Cro" tossed the third egg into the boiling water used to clean the serving stones. Then along comes Matilda who shoots Cro a look of disgust for fouling the stone water. Matilda scoops the egg from the pot and tosses it aside.

Imagine the grunts of surprise when the egg landed on the ground with a solid thump and Matilda and Cro peeled away the cracked shell to discover a perfectly cooked egg.