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…