An Appalachian Grandmother Taught Me This Egg Trick at Eight (I Never Cooked Eggs Any Other Way)

Last spring my granddaughter held her telephone up in front of my face and showed me a chef in a white coat. He was selling the world a secret about eggs, and three million people had watched him do it. I watched it twice, and then I laughed so hard I had to set my coffee down. Because my grandmother Ada did that exact thing in a black iron skillet on a wood range in the spring of nineteen sixty one, the year I was eight and she taught it to me. He had most of it right. But there was one thing she did over that skillet every single time, and he did not do it. She whispered something over every egg she ever cooked. When I asked her what she was saying, she said I would know when I could cook one without her. I grew up at the head of a hollow in Letcher County, Kentucky, in a house where eleven people sat down at one table. In our house an egg was not breakfast. An egg was money. Every egg went down the road to the store and came back as coffee and salt and sugar, and we got one apiece, on Sunday morning. So nobody was allowed to ruin one. The whole thing she taught me has five parts. The henhouse and the china egg in the nest. The little blue saucer with the chip out of the rim. The gentlest corner of the stove. The coffee can of bacon grease and the big tin spoon. And the moment she took it off, which is the part the chef was missing. I will tell you what she was whispering. And I will tell you about the winter I cooked that egg for her, every morning, when she could not get out of bed. I have never cooked an egg any other way. Not once. There is nothing to buy in this video and there never was.