My many pipedreams have included becoming a virtuoso guitar player, a painter, and founder of a horse sanctuary with a community allotment on the side. However, one that keeps coming back is the hope that I'll concoct a crazily simple food idea that reinvents either an out of fashion, relatively unknown or forgotten food, bring it to a hip new audience, and makes me a ridiculous amount of money. The key point is that there's some cheap or unloved ingredient out there - perhaps swede, kidneys or the parsons nose - and give it some kind restyle and then a marketing campaign to make it fashionable (parsons nose scratchings, anyone?). As inspiration I'm thinking of whoever invented vegetable crisps, or the infamous 'Cereal Killer' cafe...give an ingredient a little twist or revamp and people suddenly see it in a new way. A cynical get-rich-quick scheme, if you will; the kind of thing I'd normally hate but perhaps wouldn't mind if it enabled me to raise the millions I need for the horse sanctuary-allotment project.
Pickled eggs I tell you! They're the next big thing! Maybe.
In the days before Covid and whiling away some time in a lovely microbrewery pub in Rye, I was intrigued by a huge jar of pickled eggs behind the bar. I know pickled eggs are much feared and automatically despised, frequently by those who haven't even tried one. I'll be honest that up to that day it included myself; in many a pub or chip shop I've gazed intrigued at the dusty lonely jar of brown spheres in their vinegary suspended animation and thought - who eats these?? Even though I know some people swear the best thing is a pickled egg plonked on top of a just opened packet of crisps washed down with a pint I was skeptical - this isn't 1975! You don't know how long those things have been sitting there...and a creamy egg yolk with...vinegar!?? In any case, all that changed that day in Rye, when I spied these jars and was actually tempted: apparently they had been made locally and weren't picked in the usual brown malt vinegar but swimming in an interesting concoction of red wine vinegar, garlic and herbs. I tried one and it came halved on a plate surrounded by some of its pickled companions, garlic cloves and onion bits. I tasted it and was converted! There is definitely something in that contrast between the slightly rubbery pickled egg white, the soft mildness of the yolk, the spike of the vinegar. It made an ideal bar snack and a kind of tantalising appetiser with all the little other pickled morsels to eat with it.
A couple of years later and I've made my own jar, after finding a recipe for them in a book by the Queen Of All Things Culinary, Nigella Lawson. It's an obvious point to those in the know but the exciting thing she made me realise is that the pickled egg is can be made wonderful colours too just by adding certain things to the vinegar. Nigella adds beetroot into the mix, to which I also added some garlic cloves and sliced onions plus some coriander seeds, bayleaf and whole peppercorns. I am quite the fan of bright food but surely who can resist that bright yellow yolk set off by its frame of pink? The slightly sweet red wine vinegar plus the garlic and spices also permeate the egg in a pleasant way that doesn't taste too harsh.
The other brilliant thing about adding other veg in with the eggs is that when you eat one you can have some of the little onion, garlic and beetroot bits alongside which I suppose just makes it feel like more of a little 'fancy tapas' dish than a pub snack. And that's where my cynical get rich quick brain began kicking in... could I make pickled eggs cool, marketable? Even my family of fairly unpicky eaters first scoffed at my version, but my Dad at least tried some and admitted it was better than he was expecting. OK, not exactly a ringing endorsement. The potential trouble I foresee for my incredibly simplistic and superficial business plan is that eggs are probably too expensive to qualify for my get-rich-quick-and-easy aspirations, plus how much would someone really be willing to pay for a jar of 'Designer Artisan Pickled Eggs'?? Along with the rise of veganism and the results of my admittedly tiny market research (my family), I wonder if I could manage to get people to actually eat enough pickled eggs to make my millions. In any case, I'm now a devoted fan of the pickled egg and the next time I see that lonely jar in the chippie I'm going in for one of those original vinegary bad boys. Maybe the fame, fortune and the horse sanctuary allotment will just have to wait until everyone else catches up with my enthusiasm.
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