growler_south: (Default)
growler_south ([personal profile] growler_south) wrote2008-05-31 05:03 pm

Eggs is eggs

I'm periodically amused by the American paranoia about eggs. Refrigerate, use within 2 weeks, cook thoroughly: how distinctly odd. Here in the less enlightened colonies we keep our eggs in the pantry, we know that after 3 weeks they're not very good at making pavlova, and after 6 weeks they're not very good at much else (but wont kill you if you eat them), and I think everyone knows that a clean egg with an undamaged shell is fine to eat raw.

The theory used to be that the inside of an egg is as sterile as the inside of a chicken's ovary, and an ovary that has salmonella isn't very good at making anything but a dead chicken. Are american chickens perhaps so thoroughly riddled with disease that this theory doesn't hold any more? Or is it an expression of the mysophobia that informs and panicks the TV watching public with every ad break?

[identity profile] mikeybill.livejournal.com 2008-05-31 09:10 pm (UTC)(link)
I don't think it's only made from sturgeons,(but I dont know) but it is a fish byproduct. I think it is like gelatin, and they kept eggs in it to keep them from the air and preserve them

[identity profile] cpratt.livejournal.com 2008-05-31 09:17 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah, it's not always made from sturgeon. I'd only ever heard of it being used as a fining agent before, not for egg storage - weird!