by Ron James

Created on: August 30, 2010

As a follow up to my surprisingly popular article on how to cook bacon, allow me, please, to expound upon the delicious glories of the perfectly scrambled egg.

Without getting into the debate on which came first, let’s just say that eggs have been around for a long, long time. People who know about such things say that wild fowl were domesticated as early as 3200 BC and that they were laying eggs for the Chinese as early as 1400 BC. In Europe, people were reaping the rewards of domesticated hens around 600 BC. There are no precise records detailing whom the first person was to pick up the hard-shelled ovoid sphere that dropped from the nether regions of a chicken and decided that it might be something good to eat, but, following that brave soul’s example, most people today do, indeed, eat eggs produced by the chicken, or Gallus domesticus.

With its thirteen essential nutrients all prepackaged in a convenient “to go” container, some consider the egg to be nature’s perfect food. Advertising people have dubbed it “The Incredible, Edible Egg,” probably because promoting “The Incredible, Inedible Egg,” while more alliterative, would be self-defeating.

Be that as it may, eggs are enormously versatile. You can fry, poach or bake them. You can cook them in the shell and turn them into omelets, frittatas, quiches and strata casseroles. As ingredients, you can use them in cakes and cheesecakes, cookies, custards, meringues, pie fillings, soufflés and even pastries.

Best of all, you can scramble them.

I have it on good authority that God likes his eggs scrambled. [Hey! Careful with the lightning bolts!]

But if you’ve ever eaten at a Waffle House, Denny’s or IHOP, you’ll know that not just any idiot can scramble eggs, although many of them are employed by these establishments to do so.

No, there’s a little more involved in the perfect scrambled egg than breaking an egg into a pan, mixing it all up and frying it to within an inch of its life before dumping it onto a plate next to a couple of slices of overcooked or undercooked bacon. Any doofus in a stained white shirt wearing a greasy apron and a funny paper hat can do that. (See the aforementioned establishments.)

If you want your scrambled eggs to turn out the way G…..errr…You Know Who…likes them, simply follow the following procedures.

First of all, mise en place. Now, if you think I just said something dirty in

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