Mrs Bailey’s Cream-Fried Eggs

(and potatoes and carrots and pork and…)

Photo by Coffeefy Workafe on Unsplash

Fried? In cream…?

This method always sounds ever-new, but in fact it’s as old as the hills. Mrs Bailey learned it at her grandmother’s knee, when that indomitable old lady served as cook to the squire’s house, and fed half the village else.

It may seem strange at first, but cream is only juvenile butter, when you think about it: all the same contents, plus a little liquid that evaporates quickly in a hot pan. What’s left then are the familiar fats and solids that constitute butter. The milk solids will caramelise in the heat, while the fats keep everything slip-sliding around, and essentially what you end up with is browned butter, toasty in flavour and orgasmic on the tongue. (That, by the way, is not a word Mrs B learned from her grandmother. As if.)

So: take a cold well-seasoned or nonstick skillet, put a little cream into it — no, less than that, no more than a tablespoon or so, though Mrs Bailey and I famously never measure — and roll it around until it covers the bottom in a very thin layer. It helps to use a pan of appropriate size: eight inches is great for two eggs, ten for four, etc.

Now break your eggs directly into the cold and creamy pan, and set it over a moderate heat. After a minute or so, the cream will start to bubble; in another minute it’ll be boiling. In many a kitchen the chef would cuff you over the ear at this point for curdling or breaking his sauce, but here this is what we want. You’ll see the liquids steaming off, and the solids begin to brown.

When the whites are almost set, turn off the heat and clap a lid on the pan. Leave it for another minute or so, to finish off in the last of the steam.

A sprinkle of salt and pepper, and there you go. Slide the eggs out of the pan, and enjoy.

I promise, you will very soon be wondering what else you can fry like this, because the results are delicious, and the answers are many. Try asparagus, or sugar snap peas, or boiled smashed potatoes, or a pork chop, or…

(If you think the pan looks worryingly dry at any point in your experiments, the solution is simple: just add a little more cream!)

You can find a lot more of Mrs Bailey’s recipes here:

Mrs Bailey’s Martian Kitchen