Eggs à la Nabocoque

Some years ago, Harper's Magazine published a boiled egg "recipe" by Lolita's own Vladimir Nabokov. The memory of this recipe came into my obsessive brain about 6:30 this morning and, needing desperately to have Nabokovian eggs on my plate by 8:00 (and with no sign of that back issue of Harper's), I got to googlin'. Thanks to the better archivest at Concious Choice, who braved the basement of the New York Public Libary to unearth such a thing, our buttered toast dipped into the tawdry runniness right on schedule.

Let's call this photo "Metro Egg" or perhaps "Tenement Egg"



Eggs à la Nabocoque

by V.N, November 18, 1972 [A notation in ink was made at the top:] "Maxime de la Falaise McKendry for a cooking book"[And a later notation under it:] "Never acknowledged by Maxime"

Boil water in a saucepan (bubbles mean it is boiling!). Take two eggs (for one person) out of the refrigerator. Hold them under the hot tap water to make them ready for what awaits them. Place each in a pan, one after the other, and let them slip soundlessly into the (boiling) water. Consult your wristwatch. Stand over them with a spoon preventing them (they are apt to roll) from knocking against the damned side of the pan. If, however, an egg cracks in the water (now bubbling like mad) and starts to disgorge a cloud of white stuff like a medium in an oldfashioned seance, fish it out and throw it away. Take another and be more careful. After 200 seconds have passed, or, say, 240 (taking interruptions into account), start scooping the eggs out. Place them, round end up, in two egg cups. With a small spoon tap-tap in a circle and then pry open the lid of the shell. Have some salt and buttered bread (white) ready. Eat.