From Popular Mechanics the home handyman could rustle up a novelty Humpty Dumpty hard-boiled egg server for the wife.
During the 1950s I recall attending some kind of science show where a man cooked an egg on a cold surface. I don’t know whether it involved some sort of induction cooker, but to my juvenile eyes it was a miracle.
I was browsing some old digitised newspaper files recently and I came across a story from a 1903 edition of The Auckland Star entitled Boiling eggs without fire. Maybe that was going to solve the mystery for me. It didn’t but it was an intriguing read, nonetheless.
If you want a hard-boiled egg and have not the means of boiling it proceed as follows:
Take a raw egg, open it slightly at each end and allow a little of the white to run out. Then take a little first-class alcohol of high percentage and pour it into the openings. Cover the openings with wax, or with your finger and thumb, and shake the egg well, so that the alcohol penetrates to every part of it.
After three or four minutes the egg will be apparently hard-boiled, for the spirit will have made the white quite solid.
The egg may be eaten, but, of course, it will taste strongly of alcohol, which many people might find objectionable.
Somehow the idea of a booze-fuelled egg doesn’t tick any boxes for me. Certainly not a high octane spirit like vodka. During a film evening at Wellington’s Russian Embassy a long time ago, I was introduced to vodka and how to drink it.
“You don’t sip it,” said the embassy man. “You gulp it down!”
Not being a spirits drinker, I delicately sipped but a couple of my colleagues gulped – and gulped. When the lights went up, one of them emerged ashen-faced and unsteady from the Men’s and urgently pleaded “Get me out of here!”
I wonder if he’s still around? I could send him this recipe.
