Eggs is eggs

[growler_south]

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?

Comments

[sunsmogseahorse.livejournal.com]

It's true that salmonella doesn't get inside an unbroken eggshell, although they are quite porous. The salmonella can get into an egg when it's cracked open which is sometimes a slightly messy affair.

I use raw eggs in Caesar salad. I just wash them before cracking them. And I don't serve it to little children or frail elderly people. The rest of us would deal with the unlikely event of salmonella infection just fine.

[growler-south.livejournal.com]

which is sometimes a slightly messy affair.

...if you do it wrong. ;-)

[sunsmogseahorse.livejournal.com]

I live for "doing it" wrong :)