Why do fears exist, if not for us to confront them? This is what I’m telling myself as I enter Tim Spedding’s kitchen in east London on a brisk evening in late spring. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like such a bad proposition: one of the most exciting young chefs in the city, who honed his skills at the Ledbury and the Clove Club, has offered to cook dinner for me at his home. The downside is that everything on tonight’s menu contains boiled eggs – the food of my darkest culinary nightmares.
I have only myself to blame. This is all part of a plan to overcome an aversion that I’ve been trying to beat for years, without much success. Having enjoyed Spedding’s recent residency at P Franco in Hackney, where he turned out a series of extraordinary dishes from a tiny space at the back of a wine bar, I thought he’d be a good person to help out. So why is the sight of six peeled eggs on the kitchen counter making me wish I’d never asked?
The truth is, I’m not entirely sure. At an early age, for a reason I find difficult to recall, I developed a dislike of eggs. The dislike grew until, eventually, I couldn’t be in the same room as a cooked egg without feeling the need to gag.
Hard-boiled eggs are the worst. First there’s the volcanic reek that fills the room when you crack the shell. Then there’s the deathly pallor of the white and its unseemly wobble as you scoop it up. Next you have to deal with its disconcerting smoothness and the way the egg clogs up your mouth as you chew. The problem is mainly textural, but the bland taste with sulphuric undertones doesn’t help. What rankles is how much everyone else seems to love them. “I eat two boiled eggs for breakfast every morning,” says Spedding when I explain my situation. “I don’t think I could live without them.”
For someone who writes about food for a living, this is a bit embarrassing. I pride myself in being an omnivore. I’ve stomached all manner of odd animal parts in the name of research. I’ve crunched my way through plates of crickets and eaten termites off a tree trunk (they tasted slightly mushroomy). How come I have an issue with something as run-of-the-mill as an egg?
Paul Rozin is a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has spent much of his career studying food preferences and disgusts. It turns out that he shares my feelings on this matter. “I can eat a scrambled egg if it’s got other things in it,” he tells me. “But I can’t stand hard-boiled.”
How would he describe our position on eggs? As aversions? As instances of picky eating?
“You wouldn’t say someone was a picky eater if they didn’t eat beef or didn’t eat asparagus – it would have to be a broader range of stuff,” he says, “whereas aversions are fairly specific.”
I was, in fact, an extremely picky eater as a child. Aside from eggs, I was hostile to a variety of foods that included tomatoes, cheese, pasta, mushrooms and any kind of meat stronger than chicken. I wouldn’t drink tea or coffee. I had no intention of eating anything that came from the sea. If it wasn’t for my mother’s perseverance, I would have happily subsisted on a very Irish diet of mashed potatoes and frozen peas.
This attitude took a knock when I went to secondary school. By my 20s it had all but disappeared. What remained was the dislike of eggs – although, as I’ve attempted to eat them several times since, I don’t think pickiness quite explains my situation. Does that mean it was caused by a bad experience?
Rozin says it’s possible, though he does point out that only about 50% of people with a food aversion can trace it back to a specific trauma. I’m unable to do this. Nor can my mother when I call to ask. “There were so many things that you didn’t eat back then,” she says, sounding fairly exhausted at the thought. The only unpleasantness she recalls was when, aged two, I got sick after eating scallops. Afraid I was allergic, she never gave them to me again.
It would make sense if I had a deep-seated grudge against bivalves. Conditioned taste aversions, to use the technical term, are defence mechanisms, snapping into action when we associate the taste of a certain food with something that made us ill in the past. But I’m happy eating scallops as an adult. Not every food-related sickness creates an aversion, nor does every aversion have an obvious cause. “In a lot of cases,” Rozin admits, “it’s a mystery.”
It’s possible I simply never liked eggs in the first place. All humans are born with innate preferences and aversions, which can be explained in evolutionary terms. As babies we like sweetness, because sweet foods such as fruits are good sources of nutrients and energy. On the other hand, babies tend to be wary of bitter tastes, which are common in plant toxins.
Beyond that, there are genetic predilections which affect how certain people react to certain foods. “Some people are more bitter-sensitive and don’t like things like brussels sprouts,” says Rozin. These are the so-called supertasters, whose heightened sensitivity to bitter tastes is believed to be caused by the presence of the TAS2R38 gene and a higher-than-usual number of fungiform papillae on the tongue. Around 25% of people fall into this category.
“There’s another alternative,” Rozin goes on, “which is that there’s a tendency for people to not like eggs – you know, they’re gooey and they have that sulphur smell. What happens is that most people overcome it.”
It’s comforting to believe that my wariness of eggs has a basis in common sense. It’s also interesting to consider that my tastes could be changed through sheer determination. Dr Lucy Cooke, a child psychologist who specialises in eating behaviour and is currently working with the feeding disorders team at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, says that exposure is key. “Most people start drinking tea with sugar, but at some point you might decide to not to have sugar any more. It takes 10 or 15 cups before you’re used to the taste of tea that way. By which stage, if you go back to tea with sugar, it’ll taste unpleasantly sweet.”
The more accustomed we become to a particular taste, the more likely we are to find it palatable. This corresponds with a well-documented phenomenon in psychology, known as the mere-exposure effect, whereby people tend to prefer things simply because they are familiar. There is also a physiological explanation. According to a Yale University study in 2013, subjects who encountered a new flavour and experienced positive post-ingestive effects were more likely find it better next time and eat more of it.
Although genes do play a role, the food dislikes we develop in our lives are mostly learned – which means, presumably, that we can unlearn them. “Disgust is more culturally defined than we would imagine,” says Cooke. “If everybody around you eats insects, you get used to the taste of them and you’re not going to bat an eyelid if someone hands you a plateful. Whereas we’re going to go, no thanks.”
Cooke’s approach, which she has developed in her academic work (she is an honorary research associate at University College London), is to start small and persevere. “I give children little bits of food to taste every day, repeatedly, and observe and measure their response to it,” she says. “If you want to introduce food to a reluctant child, mealtimes are not the best times to do it. So we invented a game to play outside of mealtimes that’s unthreatening and involves tastes of food in tiny portions. It works. As long as the child actually gets the taste on their tongue and does it often enough, we see big changes.”
If it can work for children with far more serious aversions than mine, I’m certain I can bring Cooke’s method to bear on my issue with eggs. As a guideline, she recommends that I try between 10 and 15 exposures.
When I arrange to meet Tim Spedding shortly after this conversation, I decide to jump in at the deep end and ask for boiled eggs only.
As I hover around his kitchen, however, I’m feeling considerably less gung-ho. Spedding has produced three egg-based snacks: two hard-boiled and one soft.
The first snack, inspired by a Jane Grigson recipe, consists of sliced egg wrapped in smoked salmon and topped with chives, lemon and black pepper. By serving small portions and concealing the offending substance inside something I positively relish, Tim is easing me in gently.
I take a bite. The shock I usually experience when my body realises there’s an egg in my mouth arrives in a milder dose. It’s actually pretty good. The salt, smoke and lemon offset the bland taste – and the smooth density of the white seems acceptable when wrapped in salmon. I swallow it all down and, encouraged, eat a second one without any fuss.
Next is Spedding’s take on an egg mimosa. He’s removed the yolks, mashed them with mayonnaise, cayenne pepper and mustard powder, then piped the mix back into the halved whites with a sprinkling of salt and dry genmaicha tea on top.
This is more challenging, given the visibility of the egg and the fearful prominence of the white, which, as I lift it to my face, seems as big as the hull of a boat. Closing my eyes, I bite down. For a moment, it feels like I’m about to gag: that dreaded clogging sensation. But I hold it back – and just as the taste of the egg hits my palate, the spices kick in. The genmaicha adds some much-needed crunch. Maintaining a serene facial expression, I swallow the egg mimosa.
The final snack is a breaded soft-boiled egg, deep-fried and served with fried mushrooms and fresh peas. I’m back on safer ground here, as there are lots of elements to distract me from the fact that I’m eating an egg. Also, I don’t have a problem with the yolk when it’s runny, and in fact I take pleasure from its luxuriant richness as it oozes over the buttery mushrooms. With no small amount of pride, I hand Spedding back an empty bowl.
From a culinary point of view, his intervention is a success. I even enjoyed the experience. In terms of experimental rigour, however, it falls a little short. Would I be any better off with a hard-boiled egg if it arrived without any salmon, or spices, or Japanese toasted-rice tea to soften the blow?
I continue the aversion therapy back at home, where various members of my family think it’s hilarious that I don’t know how to boil an egg and also need to be taught how to eat one properly. At first I stick with soft-boiled, easing them down with generous pinches of salt. With some trepidation, I graduate to hard-boiled and don’t stop until I’ve clocked up 10 exposures.
How did I feel about eggs after all this? Much as Paul Rozin predicted when, at the end of our conversation, I asked whether he could overcome his own egg aversion if he really wanted to. He said he probably could, but added a caveat that rings true to me now, after weeks of cracking shells and anxiously prodding yolks with a spoon. “I could learn to put up with eggs,” he said, “but I don’t know if I’d learn to love them.”
