So brown and white eggs aren’t the same after all
Adeline loves food, lots of it and often, both at home and out. Usually that goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. This week, she takes a deeper dive than strictly necessary into brown eggs and white eggs.
I’m not fussy about Pepsi or Coca-Cola, but give me a different kind of peanut butter than Calvé and I’ll first smell the jar before I dare take a bite. There are also Nutella families and Duo Penotti households, Campina people and Zaanse Hoeve drinkers, Chiquita-banana types and generic-brand people in this life. What I’m really saying is: show me your pantry and I’ll tell you who you are.
A Duo Penotti girl
So, on the first morning at my boyfriend’s family’s house, I also had to swallow for a moment when the Nutella appeared on the table. Even though I don’t eat any spread on bread in the morning at all, I am and always will be a Duo Penotti girl, and preferably I’ll scoop out the white part too. But the cold cuts came from the butcher, so I let this hiccup slide. You know that feeling when you open someone’s fridge and get really happy because your own butter is in there, along with the right bottle of Coke? I do.
The pantry needed restocking
When my boyfriend and I sailed by boat from Fehmarn (that’s a German Wadden island, in case you’re not that into Germany and sailing) to the Netherlands, our differences became painfully clear. After a journey in gale-force-eight winds (!) we finally reached the harbour. Exhausted, with the urge to kiss the jetty, push each other over the railing and not a slice of bread left on board, we set foot on land in Laboe. It’s Germany’s Saint-Tropez, insofar as Germany has Saint-Tropez-like qualities. Off to the supermarket, because the pantry needed restocking. Again: I was emotionally balancing on the edge, because I was new to sailing at sea in a storm. Yes, you’re reading that right: I’m covering my bases.
It’s just like roulette
A foreign supermarket already comes with challenges, because what’s somewhat edible and what isn’t? You move purely on intuition from shelf to shelf, pick up jars, turn them around and put them back anyway. It’s just like roulette. Really, the only certainties are the fresh-produce section and your usual box of eggs. Or so I thought. Until my beloved put white eggs in our basket without a hint of shame. White. Eggs. In my family, we’ve been eating brown eggs for years and years. I repeat: I was balancing on the emotional edge of the abyss. Carefully, I suggested that perhaps we should get brown eggs… My boyfriend had just been seasick for five hours and looked at me as though I’d suggested shaving his mother bald. In a slightly angry whisper, right in the middle of the Deutsche supermarket aisle, I got a whole lecture about how white and brown eggs are the same. I hissed back that I really preferred the beige-brown ones and that if there was no difference, we could simply take mine (strange argument, yes). I’ve never had such an argument over the colour of an egg. What am I saying? It was the only time in my life I’ve argued over eggs, apart from when my brother and I secretly ate all my mother’s deviled eggs in the kitchen. Which were, yes indeed, made with brown eggs.
Concessions
The fairly clever intern at FavorFlav tried to explain to me last week that the brown-egg version is a trick to make people pay more. I fled the kitchen, because I don’t want to know how it works. Moral of the story: when you move in together, you have to make pantry-related concessions. You can have three guesses as to which colour eggs we eat these days.
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