National Egg Day

Today is National Egg Day. Eggs are a staple of cooking in almost every cuisine. They're used in a dizzying number of dishes and an astonishing number of ways. Eggs can be the only ingredient in a dish (poached eggs) or merely as a glue (to hold the edges of stuffed dumplings closed). They turn up in both savory and sweet dishes. Despite their prominence at the breakfast table, you can eat eggs at any meal. In France, it's not uncommon for eggs to be served as a light entree for lunch or supper.Although they've been targeted as a major source of cholesterol in the American diet, more recent work on eggs show that a couple of eggs a couple of times a week is at worst harmless and at best a good thing for you to include in your diet. My mother believed that eggs were essential for growing children. I didn't like eggs when I was a kid, but I loved grits--probably because of the enriched flavor and pretty yellow color that came from the eggs my mother sneaked into them.

Rice is the name of two towns in Illinois. One is a wide spot on Blackjack Road in the northwestern corner of the state. It's about a thousand feet from the Mississippi River, which flows broad and shallow there. Alluvial soil from the river makes the farms around Rice unusually rich. The nearest restaurant is the Railway Cafe, in Galena. This first Rice, IL is 358 miles north of the other Rice, IL. That one is thirty-six miles southeast of St. Louis, Missouri. It's a bit more substantial than Rice in the north, but has other things in common--mainly the widespread corn (not rice) agriculture. The place to eat is Rush Inn 2 Jolly's, two miles away in Nashville, IL.

azuki bean, Japanese, n.--Azuki beans are small red-brown beans grown throughout southeastern Asia and used in a wide variety of dishes, most of them sweet. In this country, you're most likely to encounter these beans as part of a flavor of ice cream. Red bean ice cream turns up in Thai, Vietnamese, and Indonesian restaurants, and sometimes in Japanese and Chinese restaurants.

The guys who make breakfast in restaurants where hundreds of people eat each hour are the most skillful chefs in the world.

The Italian frittata and the Spanish tortilla are incomparably better omelettes than the American kind. Unless the latter was made by a French chef.

Today in 1970 Ray Davies--the lead singer of the Kinks--flew from New York to London to make a last-minute change in a song he'd just recorded. The original lyrics of Lola say her lips taste just like Coca-Cola. That couldn't get on the BBC in England, because it was a product name. So he changed it to "cherry cola." C-O-L-A, cola. Luh-luh-luh-luh-Lola.

Today in 1850, Kansas City, Missouri was founded. You say "K.C." in proximity to food, and most people think of steaks. In fact, Kansas City's steakhouses are just okay, despite the millions of cattle that came to its stockyards. Kansas Citians consider barbecue to be their real specialty, and that it is. The town is full of great barbecue joints, embracing a style that takes a little bit from many different places. Beef and pork are both essential parts of it. Gates, Arthur Bryant's, and the rather slick KC Masterpiece are the best we've tried.

This is the day that a law went into effect in the U.S. banning animal parts from animal feed. The target was the practice of feeding beef scraps to cows, which aside from being gross and cannibalistic is suspected as a vector for the spread of mad-cow disease. I'd be mad too.

Today is the feast day of St. Morand, a patron saint of vintners and winemakers. He was a Benedictine monk in the 1100s, and the legend that he is remember for is that he went through one Lent eating nothing but a single bunch of grapes. Must have been a big bunch.

This is the birthday of Chef Adolphe Duglere, in 1805. He was the chef of the Cafe Anglais in Paris. His name lives on in a classic French fish dish, usually made with sole. The sauce is creamy, with onions and tomatoes.

Hamilton Fish Jr., a Congressman from New York for many years, and who bears a name distinguished in American politics since the early 1800s, was born today in 1926. . . Josephine Baker, the famous Parisian dancer of the Folies Bergere, frequently photographed with her clothes off, was born on this date in 1906.

"An egg is always an adventure; the next one may be different."--Oscar Wilde.

"The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind."--H.L. Mencken.