#135 – 800 Egg Recipes! Interview with Too Many Eggs author Mimi Smith-Dvorak

Eggs seem the simplest of foods, right? Why would someone write a book with over 800 egg recipes? We both have this book: “Too Many Eggs”, and it has blown our minds with its plethora of recipes, practical tips and fascinating history.

So we were very excited to talk to its author, Mimi Smith Dvorak. In this episode, she shares with us the story of this book. We talk about the crazy lengths she went to when researching and some of our favourite recipes in it. We also talk about the practicalities of eggs, with some really helpful tips on how to work with them including a deep dive into mayonnaise, with her expert tips from having made it over and over again. Along the way, we talk about sustainable food, her incredible historic cookbook collection and much more.

This is a fun episode, and with the book that you can buy in hardback or download free as a PDF from toomanyeggs.com, you’ll never look at eggs the same way again.

The personal views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect our own personal views or opinions. We recognize that our guests are whole persons and this may include views we or our audience actively disagree with; our guests are invited to the show because we feel they have something valuable to share with us all, and we do not ask them to censor their personal views on air. Our sharing of their work is not necessarily an endorsement of their personal views.

Resources:

Get a copy of “Too Many Eggs” from Mimi’s website. You can buy a hardback there, or you can download a PDF copy for free.

You can also, in the US, buy “Too Many Eggs” from our Amazon-free online bookstore. In doing so, you’ll be supporting the podcast.

 

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Transcript:

Alison:
Very exciting guest, Mimi Smith-Dvorak, who has written the incredibly big book, Too Many Eggs, which I have down with me here.

Alison:
Both of us have your book, Mimi, both Andrea, my co-host, and I have it. And we both love it. And I know that so many listeners do already have it. I’ve seen it on the shelves of supporters of the podcast when I’ve been to their houses. So here in England, I’ve seen it on definitely two shelves, as well as my own shelf, which is a good sign. So Too Many Eggs is a book all about eggs. It is nearly 800 pages and it has over 800 recipes. There are so many recipes in it. And even just in the contents page, there were some names of things I’d never even heard of, let alone in the actual pages. I wrote some of them down here. So Migas, Tamargos, Iranian Cuckoos and Blintzes. I’d never heard of any of those and those are just in your contents pages so we’re going to be talking about your book Mimi thank you for coming on and being with me today.

Mimi:
Well good morning or wait good afternoon whatever.

Alison:
Time this afternoon it’s it’s wonderful.

Mimi:
To be here so yeah I um you know don’t ask me what’s on a specific page because I don’t remember anymore.

Alison:
No I understand I understand that’s fine I’ve got all the page numbers and everything here so you don’t need to talk about So the first question we always ask on our podcast is, what is the last thing you ate? So what’s the last thing you ate, Mimi?

Mimi:
Gee, let’s think about this for a moment. It was last night, since it’s morning for me. Actually, the last thing I had was a lovely cup of coffee. How’s that?

Alison:
Okay, coffee. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Do you drink your coffee with milk or do you have it black?

Mimi:
I make a cappuccino, so it has foam on top and honey in it. So local honey. Oh, wow.

Alison:
A really nice tree. That sounds really good. Okay.

Alison:
I want to talk a bit about the origin story of the book because I’ve heard you talk about it on other interviews and it’s really quite interesting, particularly for our listeners who are very, interested in cooking as much as possible and sourcing as locally as possible, getting out of grocery stores. A lot of them have their own chickens. So can you explain how you came to start or want to write a book with 800 egg recipes in it, please?

Mimi:
Well, I moved from an urban center to the countryside where I’ve got seven acres. And in the urban center, I had four chickens. So when I get here, I said, well, let’s just order a bunch of chickens. So I ordered from a hatchery who mails the chickens to you and the minimum order is 25. And you can do a straight run. So I had all hands. So I… I get 25 chickens, no idea, you know, I mean, it’s a mess and they’re everywhere and it was just a horrible experience. And, you know, I had to keep increasing what I was keeping, you know, like, it was just a mess. So finally, I get them out to the chicken coop and I didn’t realize that 25 chickens, young chickens, the hens will lay an egg a day. So I was getting two dozen eggs a day. And all my neighbors here were like no no no thank you no thank you we have enough eggs, okay so at one point I opened my refrigerator and there were like 16 dozen eggs there oh my gosh and I’ve collected cookbooks since I was young so I had a lot I’ve got a lot of very old cookbooks, you know even from the 1800s, That’s old in the United States.

Mimi:
And I would just go through them and go through them and go, you know, that’s only two eggs. I need something that uses a dozen eggs. And the kids, my kids got sick of angel food cakes, obviously, and all the pound cakes and all that. So I started going into other recipes. And I kept a notebook. And I discovered all kinds of new recipes. And I’ve actually cooked every, all the recipes in that book except two. And I, the kids were so sick of eggs, but I would, I would try all kinds of different things. So I, I, I had this very deep notebook and then I had, my brother died and I went through a grief and during my grief process, I said, well, I’m just going to make this into a cookbook. So it and from start to finish the whole thing took me about 12 years because I don’t care I mean I it’s not just about the eggs I like the history of the eggs you know the history of the recipes book definitely yeah and it’s like I really like where things came from and there’s a lot of debate in the book like like when it comes to something like mayonnaise, that you know I don’t think it’s French I think it’s Basque because, the Basque predated them with, a recipe called Bayonese. Like…

Alison:
Mm-hmm. Too similar.

Mimi:
Yeah. Oh, those tricky French… The only real difference between the two is mayonnaise has a lot of hot spices in it and mayonnaise doesn’t. That’s really the difference.

Alison:
You know, I remember reading that you also said that creme brulee originally probably came from Italy, not France. So, again, there’s lots and lots of history in the book, which is fascinating to read.

Mimi:
Yeah, it’s a little too fussy for a general from what I know of English old recipes. So, just a little too fussy. that, you know, that top crust is just like, oh, it doesn’t sound like them. So anyway, so I put this book together, and it was kind of an act of love. And then I, of course, became obsessive about it. My family was like, please, no more egg stories. Don’t tell us any more about eggs. So yeah, and then my daughter actually, came up with the art, and she worked with the designer to put it together and

Mimi:
since the book is much too thick for any normal publisher we did a self-publish on it so.

Alison:
Yeah yeah that makes it even more weird the illustrations are very very beautiful did you know from the beginning that you wanted to put illustrations in it not photographs or were you going to have nothing what how did that come about.

Mimi:
That was my daughter, and she found a lot of old wood, they’re old woodcuts. I wanted, I was going to just have pictures, but I like old cookbooks that you could, I don’t like the food porn cookbooks where it’s just full of pictures of food because I don’t care. So I was more nuts and bolts, 1940s style of cookbook, but she convinced me to just get rid of the pictures and just put in descriptions when I needed descriptions, and then the woodcuts. So it’s a very odd book.

Alison:
I think it’s very beautiful. And it’s got, you know, sort of borders and things around sections, which make it, like you said, like an old cookbook. I’m writing a book about oats at the moment, and I don’t want to put photographs in it, because like you, I’m not into food porn. I don’t want to deliberately scatter these things around it to make it look like it’s supposed to look like for people who apparently flick through books these days. I’m working hopefully I’m going to work with an illustrator to put a few beautiful kind of hash sort of style illustrations in it, so when I saw your book and I saw you know these beautiful illustrations in it the woodcuts I just thought wow it does it reminds you of old cookbooks, rather than this sort of new style that’s supposed to hit you in the face sort of thing and I really like that and I think a lot of our listeners appreciate that as well because they’re a lot to them like the old style of cookbooks rather than you know new kind of shiny cookbooks, well um you know yeah you know.

Mimi:
The new cookbooks i think lose a lot because it’s like they give you the recipe and then they give you a picture of it but they don’t tell you any details like you know, like the really old cookbooks don’t even they don’t even give you a recipe they’re just like you know here put these things.

Alison:
Together and yeah.

Mimi:
And it’s like you know wing it um, So yeah, I love old cookbooks and I have, I don’t know, I’ve got about a thousand cookbooks here.

Alison:
Wow. I made a note to talk to you about that later on in the episode. I think you’re right that they lose something because what I’ve noticed not relying on photographs as I’m writing is I have to be so much more descriptive, and find clever ways to explain when it’s done or when it’s ready for the next stage or what it’s supposed to look like when it comes out in a way that, a photograph would you know I wouldn’t have to do that I’d be let off the hook right and so it becomes more interesting to read I think because of that and it makes me go deeper into what I’m doing.

Mimi:
Well cooking isn’t I mean I don’t bake I’m not a big baker because.

Alison:
Baking is too.

Mimi:
Much chemistry for me you.

Alison:
Know things.

Mimi:
Have to be rather exacting I’m more of a you know jazz musician you know improvisation, and cooking I think is in your head I think you like I read a lot of recipes I never follow them. And then, you know, you just kind of get the gist of what you want and you adjust things for your own taste. And I think that’s way more, that’s just, you know, it’s more fun. Of course, I made the mistake of getting very deep in the slow food movement, about the turn of the century. And I decided that, well, we stopped eating any fast food. So we stopped eating any prepared foods. We stopped eating pretty much everything if it wasn’t local and in season. And I went overboard and I decided to make the absolute ultimate cheesecake. So I had, at the time I had ducks, so I used duck eggs, because duck eggs have a different quality. And I made a pound cake, and from the pound cake I dried it out, and then I ground up the things, that was my crust, and then I made my own cheese from some raw milk in the area. And I made my own sour cream, and I did all this. It took me a week to assemble this cheesecake.

Alison:
Labor of love.

Mimi:
And it was just a cheesecake. Oh, no.

Alison:
You’re expecting it to be like the best cheesecake you’ve ever tasted.

Mimi:
And I also would take two of my favorite chickens and I would put them in a separate cage and I would feed them special things to see if I could flavor their eggs, which you can. You can. There’s a place in upstate New York that feeds their chickens a lot of beets. So they get an incredibly red yolk, which is beautiful. Well, I decided I was going to feed my chickens a lot of onions to see if I could flavor it. And you can, and it’s not that good.

Alison:
Not very nice. I think I’ve heard you on other interviews talk about your kind of wanting to cook everything. And at one point you said something, which I wrote down because I knew our listeners would resonate with it. On one of those interviews, you said, we trust minimum wage unhappy workers to make our food. And I thought, yes, absolutely.

Alison:
I totally agree with you. And I think, you know, the amazing, raft of recipes for eggs in your book, I wonder when you said you’re an improvised cook, it must have been hard for you to write them down because actually saying, okay, this is what the recipe is. And not only just remembering to write it down, but also setting yourself on it and saying okay this is the end this is where I’m finishing I’m not going to improvise anymore was that difficult for you.

Mimi:
That was difficult. The other thing that was difficult was trying every way in the world to cook hard-boiled eggs to see which one I could get the shells to come off.

Alison:
Okay.

Mimi:
So, I mean, I pierced the thing. I put in baking soda in the water. I put vinegar in the water. I did all those things. None of them work. But what works is steaming the eggs. Instead of boiling them, you steam them. And then the second they’re done steaming, then you plunge it in cold water. And of course, if you want to peel a lot of eggs easily, you shake the pan. It’s the old military way and you crack all the shells. That works.

Alison:
So even with really fresh eggs, that works?

Mimi:
Yeah, it will.

Alison:
Yeah.

Mimi:
Okay. I mean, yeah.

Alison:
Interesting.

Mimi:
I mean, I tried everything and the kids were just like, more hard-boiled eggs, please.

Alison:
Because they’ve got to eat everything.

Mimi:
But I did use my grandmother’s recipes for making hard-boiled egg cookies, which is just, my grandmother was German, and it’s a German recipe. And she would always go, well, you know, if I know you’re going to snack, so here’s, there’s like two eggs in every cookie pretty much.

Alison:
Okay. Decent. A decent snack.

Mimi:
Yeah.

Alison:
Okay, let’s take a quick break, and I will come back with some more questions. Okay, so one of the things I love about Too Many Eggs, which we’ve put in our, bookstore for the podcast, you can also buy it on your site. But there’s also a free PDF version available to download. So you can go onto your site and go to the page.

Alison:
I’ll put a link in the show notes and then you can get a PDF copy of it to have. Rather than that you know it’s beautiful having on the shelf though because it’s such a beautiful, book and it’s wonderful to read the history and actually have the paper copy one of the things I love about the book is that it’s so thorough, so it’s not just you know 800 recipes and loads and loads of history but it also has those basics basics so like you were saying with the hard boiled eggs you know how to hard boil how to soft boil how to poach how to fry how to scramble all things that, you know sometimes we get set in our ways with we’ve got a way that our mum told us and I was reading through these thinking oh my gosh there’s all these different ways you can do um, there were simple recipes and then on top of that there’s a more complicated and lesser known recipes you know or techniques such as the coddling, um the mayonnaise section which we’ll talk about is is really amazing and you’ve got linguistic stuff in there and you’ve got historic.

Mimi:
Fan of footnotes and that who knows why I love footnotes so there are footnotes throughout the book um I love I didn’t know I mean I’ve heard of coddling I didn’t know.

Alison:
About coddling and it’s like I heard the word like you and I was like oh I can actually find out what it is now I’ve got a book that tells me.

Mimi:
It was yeah a lot of it was I mean I really did become so focused that it was like all I was doing was pouring through cookbooks and pouring.

Alison:
Through online.

Mimi:
Things to find new ways to cook. Now, as a child, I lived in Iran. That’s why there’s Iranian recipes in there. That’s why I get the Iranian cuckoo.

Alison:
Yeah.

Mimi:
Other than that, my father was a marine engineer, so he went around the world like 37 times. And he was a really good cook, and he would talk about different foods from around the world, and he could make them. So there’s weird stuff thrown in there for that. I got a little obsessive.

Alison:
I mean, you’d have to be to come up with this many recipes. I didn’t know that there were so many recipes in there. I mean, it just feels like eggs are such a simple food, and yet they contain multitudes, the ideas that they sparked in my head. And just the simple things like for poaching, you know, I always poach my eggs in water. And then I was just reading the section on poaching and thinking, hang on a minute, I can do it in tomato sauce. I could do it in cheese sauce. I can do it in wine. I could do it in beer. And I remember the crepe section, just like so many different crepes. From around the world, there are so many different variations that you’ve brought together that there’s never going to be, you know, you can never get bored with an egg looking at your book and all the different recipes.

Mimi:
And I absolutely was delighted with the French toast or Pan Purdue is the New Orleans version of it, which is the Poor Nights of Windsor.

Alison:
Yeah.

Mimi:
It’s the same recipe. The same thing, yeah. It’s exactly the same thing. And then the fact that in parts of the world, they eat it as a main dish with ketchup. And I was like, ah. So, yeah, it was fun. It was really a fun thing. And I would just… Now, the drink recipe section is the best. I’ve thoroughly tried those.

Alison:
Okay, excellent. So, what’s your favorite recipe in the book? Do you have a favorite recipe from the book? or has it changed?

Mimi:
No, kind of. My very favorite recipe were the savory bread puddings.

Alison:
Okay.

Mimi:
Because I didn’t know about those. I mean, that’s not an American thing at all. And a savory bread pudding, you can feed an army with stale bread and eggs and leftovers, whatever’s left over in your refrigerator. And then the other one that we don’t have in this country, although we just don’t have it, is scotch eggs. Ah, yeah. Yeah, which are just lovely.

Alison:
I’ve got a note about the Scotch Hags because I was going to talk to you about it. So the Scotch Hags, I remember reading about it and you saying, you know, that they’re a pub kind of speciality in England. And in the south of England… All the old pubs, you know, that would have been there a couple of hundred years ago have all been taken over by, you know, multinational conglomerates or companies that basically own lots and lots and lots of pubs and then have a food menu. And not so many of them sell Scotch eggs. And so I was going to tell you, I was going to say, you know, Scotch eggs aren’t really a thing in pubs anymore. But then I went to York last month and I was walking through York and I saw a pub there and it said traditional Scotch eggs on the window, like as a thing. So I thought, actually, there are still Scotch eggs in this country sold in pubs, at least in York, definitely.

Alison:
I love Scotch eggs. So Scotch eggs for people who don’t know what they are. They’re basically a hard-boiled egg, and then surrounding that hard-boiled egg is, generally a meaty kind of paste, which you sort of pack around the hard-boiled egg, and then you cook those so the meat around the side gets cooked as well. And then you can flavour that meat with anything. In England, traditionally, pork was used around the Scotch egg, and often breadcrumbs are on the outside of that. You’ve got recipes for a Nigerian, Chinese one. Now, I actually tried the Nargisi Kofta, I’m probably pronouncing it wrong, which is a Scotch egg, which is kind of Indian with coriander and things in it. And for a long time, I got the book and I was like, right, that’s the first recipe I’m going to try. And absolutely loved it with lamb wrapped around. So, yeah, I’m a fan of those Scotch egg recipes, too.

Mimi:
Yeah. You know, for here, I was like, look, they’re great for the Super Bowl, you know, for our big, you know, sports events. Because they go great with beer. Yeah, absolutely.

Alison:
That’s why they were in a pub favourite.

Mimi:
Isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That was one of my… And then I really like quiches, so I make a lot of quiches.

Alison:
Okay.

Mimi:
So… My tastes have evolved because I now don’t, I’ve developed an allergy to wheat, to wheat proteins. So I can’t, so yeah, I don’t do bread anymore. So I was really glad in the book I had had recipes to do quiches with like a mashed potato crust instead of a normal crust. Yeah. Now, in the recipe, my grandmother would make this, which is why it’s in there, in the deviled egg recipe, the hard-boiled eggs, spiced eggs, whatever.

Alison:
Yeah.

Mimi:
We have a dessert one. Because, you know, that dated back to Roman times. The Romans would show up and they would have a chicken coop with them. They had a wagon that was a chicken coop. Because, you know, because to stop an army, you just kill all your animals and then the army would. So, they’d bring their own chickens. And so it was the original fast food. And so Roman soldiers ate a lot of, there’s a lot of old chicken recipes. But they have a hard-boiled egg recipe that was a dessert. And they would mix the hardened yolk with honey. And it was sweet. So I have a couple in there. One of them is chocolate. My grandmother used to make it. It was a chocolate deviled egg. It’s a dessert egg. And I kind of really went crazy on that.

Mimi:
Chapters, just because I was fascinated by what can you mix with the egg yolk? And, you know, and it’s like, why we call them devils? We call them stuffed eggs in a lot of parts of the United States because the, very devout churches said, oh, you can’t eat anything that’s a devil. Yeah, yeah, okay. And it was only called deviled because they put paprika on it that was very spicy.

Alison:
Ah, I see, I see. So we had a conversation with supporters of the podcast, I think it was last month, where they were saying that basically deviled eggs, every time you have a potluck in the States, there’s always got to be someone who’s brought deviled eggs. They’re really that popular. Is that true? Yeah?

Mimi:
It was in the 50s, 60s. It was in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. But then when people stopped cooking, not so much.

Alison:
Yeah. Okay.

Mimi:
Yeah.

Alison:
Because I basically said, I don’t think I’ve ever made deviled eggs. And they were like, I’m completely shocked. Deviled eggs are like a big thing. But now, of course, I’ve got all your recipes. So I can try those.

Mimi:
Well, you know, we used to, in the dark ages of cooking over here, people used to bring Jell-O salads to things.

Alison:
Oh, no, no. I don’t think I want to hear about that.

Mimi:
Yeah. America lost its way for cooking. At least it’s finally coming back with some people.

Alison:
So so um with the quiches i’m thinking now if you can’t eat wheat can can you eat other ancient grains can you eat spelt and grains like that no and not even anything with gluten in.

Mimi:
Not well it’s not the gluten it’s a.

Alison:
Protein in.

Mimi:
It so i can’t eat any related ones either like oats oats or rye either.

Alison:
Oh gosh so if you wanted to make a pastry you’d have to go gluten-free which is a bit more finickety isn’t it it’s like eating cardboard yeah i just don’t eat it yeah mashed potato is interesting, as a base instead for a quiche. I’ve never tried that. My son’s allergic to potato. It goes everywhere, doesn’t it? So we can’t eat potatoes.

Mimi:
Yeah.

Alison:
So, yeah.

Alison:
Yeah. Okay. I wanted to talk about the egg soup chapter because there is literally a whole chapter on egg soups. And I wanted to read something from the first paragraph, which is on page 499, if other people have the book in front of them. And you write, soup is a very old dish. It is as old as fire and a container to boil water in. The oldest written egg soup recipe I could find was from the early 16th century in England. The recipe is simple. For each person, take strong flavoured broth, one beaten egg, an egg-sized chunk of cheese cut into small bits, mince scallion or green onion and mince spring greens. Take the boiling stock, skim off the foam, beat the egg and whisk it into the broth, add the cheese and the greens before serving. I just think that’s so simple and so easy to just, I mean, because most of our listeners make broth, and love eggs and love cheese and so that’s just such a a wonderful old but new fast food when you’ve got the broth and you’ve got the eggs and you’ve got the cheese it just sounds absolutely delicious and it.

Alison:
And it’s from the 16th century which is amazing, I made um the garlic soup the sopa di agio I don’t know how you pronounce it, and with my friend and we that garlic soup is like garlic and tomatoes, and then you kind of dribble the egg in and try to make noodles in it and we weren’t very successful we had like little mini noodles rather than really long, kind of long noodles i’m tempted to, to try it again and go a bit more slowly to try and you know because it would be really awesome if i could tip, the beaten egg into the soup and get a really long noodle did you did you end up making really long noodles when you did that one do you remember well.

Mimi:
Um i you know i’ve done well it’s basically egg drop soup i.

Alison:
Mean yeah yeah.

Mimi:
And And with egg drop soup, I don’t have the patience to make things. My husband actually does a lovely egg drop soup. Mine is, you know, I get… Frustrated. It’s like, um, I did try to do the, there’s, I tried a lot of different things. I’d look at cooking shows and go, well, I can do that.

Alison:
Yeah.

Mimi:
Yeah. Um, I was more about the flavors and getting things together and like with the soups, I never had an egg soup except for egg drop soup ever. So I was like shocked, you know, like that there were so many. I mean, I, it was like, that pretty much everything you know like yeah and I was I was surprised by like um there was an oatmeal where you put an egg in oatmeal and I was like at first horrified by the idea and then kind of warmed up to it it was actually it’s not bad.

Alison:
I really like that I do that with my oatmeal quite a lot I put an egg in it because I think extra protein and it makes it richer, um so I was pleased to see that one in there definitely um the last the last recipe in the book I wanted to tell you this as well as the scotch egg thing the 100 year old eggs on, page 741 i have eaten a 100 year old egg i went to hong kong and i ate one and i didn’t know what they were then and we we ended up, we we were supposed to go to one restaurant but we ended up going in the door next door by mistake in a restaurant that we didn’t know we were going in and, the food was really unfamiliar and then we had these 100 year old eggs, put in front of us which are brown and obviously the white bit has a different color brown to the yellow bit even though they’re both brown, and we were told that they were 100 year old eggs and we were like because they’re not 100 years old that’s just the name um but I wanted to tell you that I’d actually tried a 100 year old egg yeah in real life.

Mimi:
That’s the recipe I didn’t make in the book because I.

Alison:
Was like I’ve.

Mimi:
You know my as I said my father was a marine engineer so he ran went around the world yeah and my father was a big thing of like well if they can eat it you can eat it.

Alison:
Um

Mimi:
Not one of my favorite things he’d always say. And so, I mean, I’ve had baluts, which is the duck that’s cooked in the shell. It’s a fully formed duck. Okay, I love that. And I’ve had a tiny bite of a thousand-year-old egg, and I don’t like the smell. I’m a texture and smell person, and it was like, I’m not making these. I know they exist. I better include them, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they’re quite a gastronomic adventure.

Alison:
Indeed, they were. And for me, I think I was in my 20s and I was like, what on earth is this egg? It’s brown. And it’s like telling me it’s 100 years old. Why should I eat that?

Alison:
But I did because I’m game. So another note I made here was you talk about bechamel sauce on page 421. And you say that another way to make it is using a beurre manier, which is a French word in old French cookbooks, where you need the fat and the flour together to make a ball that’s greasy. And then you put that in scalded milk and this kind of thing of the same thing in different communities i because i’m researching oats in the uk the history of oats in the uk i read in some medieval um, texts from ireland from northern ireland that they basically did the same thing with oats they took butter and oatmeal, that you know the dried stone ground oats and they rolled it together into a greasy ball and then they kept that and then whenever they wanted to thicken something and make a sauce they could drop those greasy balls, into either milk or broth and then use it as a basis for a soup and so it’s just fascinating that, something that is you know that makes a bechamel but is a different process in an old french cookbook the same thing was happening with a slightly different grain in in ireland as well.

Mimi:
I find it fascinating. That’s one of the things about food history. And I really was quite, I love food history. I think food history, I mean, that’s why I got into old cookbooks when I was a kid. You know, the first cookbook I had was, that I found was a Mrs. Lincoln’s cookbook, which isn’t that old. It’s probably from 1850s. And that kind of set me off. Because I like the history of things and I like, you know, and it seems like a lot of these, a lot of recipes can’t be one area because it’s like such an either such an obvious idea yeah i think it is kind of an obvious you know that it, you know people combine things and i don’t think there’s anything truly unique about food i think we, you know there’s a lot of things that are very much the same um yeah just with different origin stories which is why i like origin stories um yeah, you know food is you know, half the fun of eating is making the food absolutely absolutely.

Alison:
Talking of half the fun of eating being making the food i remember you talking on one other podcast about some crazy moment you had in one of the recipe testing where you were had something in the end of a pair of tights and you were swinging around your head.

Mimi:
Could you tell us about that okay so there is a little device in um, asia that is a an egg spinner and it’s so that you can hard boil a scrambled you can scramble the egg inside the shell, and then hard boil it so you have a screen so it’s not you know, white okay it’s yeah yeah so i read all these different things and people are like well you can swing it you know because the The thing is you have to get enough force to it that it’ll break the sack inside, you know, the yolk sack.

Alison:
Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah.

Mimi:
It was interesting. I mean, I was off the deep end.

Alison:
Did it work? Could you get it to do it?

Mimi:
I did a couple of times. And I was not impressed by the final product, but some people I’m sure, you know, it was like, okay, well, it’s all mixed up inside. Great.

Alison:
Yeah, that was worth it.

Mimi:
Well, it was like I also got a giant pan of boiling water and to poach it, to poach a scrambled egg, basically. And what you did is you’d scramble your egg and then you’d spin the water and then put the… I couldn’t get it to… I mean, I tried so many times. I just didn’t have a big enough pot.

Alison:
Okay, I see.

Mimi:
My adventures are written in there. I had the entire chapter I took out, which was about other bird eggs.

Alison:
Okay. Why did you take that out?

Mimi:
Because, you know, the book is already too big.

Alison:
Yeah, okay. All right. Fair enough. A hundred pages. Yeah.

Mimi:
And I was actually very fascinated by your gulls eggs in the UK.

Alison:
Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Mimi:
You know, the…

Alison:
People used to climb, like, ridiculous ways to steal them from the sides of cliffs. And I’m sure lots of them died in the process.

Mimi:
Yeah.

Alison:
I’ve never eaten a gulls egg. I’ve never eaten a gulls egg.

Mimi:
And they were served with a little, hard-boiled with a little bit of celery salt. I found some old menus and it was like, wow, I’m sure they were fishy. I mean, I’m sure they were fishy because after my adventures. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, I really like duck’s eggs. I think duck’s eggs are phenomenal for baking when I finally bake.

Alison:
Why do you think they’re better? Explain why you think they’re better than chicken.

Mimi:
Because if you’re making a sponge cake, the duck egg is much thicker. The white is much thicker. It’s really thick. And it holds foam really well. So you can make a really good meringue out of it. And then the yolk is delicious. Now to eat it just plain, it’s kind of chalky, but in a baked good, it’s fantastic. Or with French toast, it’s really good. I like duck eggs a lot. They have their place in the world. They make a very nice, like if you’re using a hard boiled egg as a garnish or something, it has just a little more texture. Um like okay and it’s good in a you know good deviled egg sandwich um.

Alison:
I’ve eaten duck eggs we have them at the market here and one.

Mimi:
Of the sellers.

Alison:
Regularly has them and of course they’re like you know they’re huge and my son who’s 12 is like look at that egg and so i do buy them, but i’ve only ever had them cooked really simply so i’ve only ever fried it or boiled it or scrambled it and it’s interesting i haven’t ever put it in anything baked so.

Mimi:
I’m interested.

Alison:
To have a go and see what it does do.

Mimi:
French toast but do a french toast with an almond extract instead of a vanilla extract okay it’s really good yeah that’s what i’m okay i miss that yeah, um thank you i use duck eggs i had ducks and chickens and geese and i love goose eggs but geese only laid in the spring um, turkey eggs are really interesting and they only lay in the spring um i’ve had emu eggs which is a little oh my gosh, yeah i haven’t had an ostrich egg just because we don’t have ostriches around here but yeah yeah you know emu egg must be absolutely humongous, it’s it’s kind of fun it’s like you know you only have to crack it’s really hard to crack the egg that’s the hardest part you know i don’t know how you crack it and keep the yolk, intact yeah yeah but it it’s fun it’s like i you know the eggs are i mean people eat eggs i’m sure i mean i have parakeets i always look at their eggs going, but you’ve never you’ve never stolen one i really like quail eggs i’m a big fan of quail eggs i think they’re lovely yeah yeah you know peeling is a little hard.

Alison:
I i the only thing i mean i know from trying to crack duck eggs that the shell is much harder than a chicken egg so i can only imagine how much harder an emu shell is to a chicken egg.

Mimi:
Must be really quite tough i would always blow my duck eggs you know put holes at either end and blow them out.

Alison:
Ah, okay.

Mimi:
Because they’re…

Alison:
And why’d you do that?

Mimi:
Because they became Christmas ornaments.

Alison:
Oh, I see.

Mimi:
We would decorate them, yeah.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah. It’s pretty, pretty.

Mimi:
Well.

Alison:
Okay, so talking about the crazy moment with the tights, did you, I mean, you must have had disasters in testing 798 recipes or more than that. What other disasters or what disasters did you have when you were testing the recipes?

Mimi:
Well, from having all the chickens, I learned really quickly about always floating my eggs to make sure they were good.

Alison:
Okay, yeah.

Mimi:
Because there’s nothing quite as exciting as having an egg explode in your kitchen. Quite aromatic. I had lots of disasters. And, you know, I mean, I threw out more than a few eggs. But, you know, I had a never-ending supply. I mean, I would usually feed the disasters back to the chickens.

Alison:
Okay. So they got to eat what went wrong.

Mimi:
It was my perpetual motion machine.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mimi:
Yeah, go on. Well, the one thing about eggs are very forgiving, so it’s hard to wreck an egg, and I have. The hardest chapter to cook is I was playing around with hard-boiling eggs on the barbecue grill.

Alison:
Okay, wow.

Mimi:
Americans are nuts about grilling and smoking. Yeah, barbecuing, yeah. And… So I read a lot of recipes and I would burn eggs regularly on the barbecue grill because I wouldn’t wait till it was cool enough. And then for a while I was hard boiling the eggs and then cracking the shells and then I would smoke the eggs.

Alison:
Okay, that sounds nice.

Mimi:
To make pickled eggs.

Alison:
Yeah.

Mimi:
I don’t like pickled eggs, but I would try these different recipes and I routinely just ruined the egg. I mean, it was just like, oh, a little too much hickory on this.

Alison:
And did you give those ones to the chickens?

Mimi:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, my chicken’s good.

Alison:
They just eat it. They just eat it. So now, having, I mean, the books, you published the book quite a while ago. Have you still got the chickens? Are you still eating eggs or not?

Mimi:
I don’t know. The survivor finally died a few years ago. That was the last chicken. Okay. Where I am, we’ve got a lot of predators.

Alison:
Okay, it’s difficult.

Mimi:
Yeah, I mean, we have everything up here. I kind of got sick of chicken eggs. I picked them up from some of the honor farms around here. And honor farm is where they have it out for sale. And there’s got a little money box and you shove your money in. So I go to all the various honor farms when I need chicken eggs. And I do that. And my neighbors have chickens. So now they’re giving me eggs. But I’m a little off eggs.

Alison:
Yeah, well, I can understand. After 12 years, I mean, 12 years of work on something is such a long stretch of time in a society where, you know, instant gratification is encouraged and rewarded to spend 12 years of your life working on something. You can understand after that, you’re like, I want a bit of a break now from the eggs.

Mimi:
There’s that.

Alison:
Okay.

Mimi:
Yeah. I write other things.

Alison:
Let’s go to another ad break and we’ll come back and talk about some practical stuff.

Alison:
Okay, so I want to talk about some practical things because there is a lot of practical stuff in your book as well as all of the interesting and historical things. And I feel like you must have learned so much about eggs in your research. Were there some things that you could say, oh, this research completely changed the way I do this with an egg? Was there anything that really changed you?

Mimi:
Actually, the whole book. I mean, you know, before getting too many eggs, I did what everyone did. I fried eggs occasionally, and I occasionally did a scramble, and I didn’t even try omelets, and I never made quiche, and I never did anything. I just did the same old thing. So what it did is it kind of expanded my view um.

Mimi:
And my cooking you know cooking eggs they’re like I would I was trying to find the definitive way to do just a sunny side up egg just a, fried egg and there are so many different arguments about you know you do it this way and you do it that way and like certain chefs were like oh no you have to, cook it super slow And then other people are like, you cook it really fast. And one of my favorite recipes, and I still use it, is the Spanish fried egg. Spanish, yeah. Spanish fried egg where you fry it in olive oil. You’re poaching an egg in olive oil. And then it is delicious over a steak. It’s like it is so good over a steak. So you just poach it. So when you poach an egg in oil, it gets kind of a little more crispy than a regular poached egg. And it really has a different texture. I don’t know. It makes the yolk really delicious. And I would do that and then just pop it over a steak. And it’s way better than making a fancy sauce. It was just delicious. Um, I never knew I had to do, I mean, I would have never thought about cooking anything like that in oil, in deep fat oil.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah.

Mimi:
So, so, you know.

Alison:
Interesting.

Mimi:
And which then, you know, took me off on a whole nother direction with my cooking anyway. And then I found, you know, the odd recipes, like I’ve got one where you, you, you soft boil an egg and then you drain out the yolk and then you replace the yolk. The recipe I found was an old, it’s a lovely recipe, and I think it was Palloprat. He would then stuff the egg with foie gras. So where the yoke was, he put four. So I started playing around with that because I thought it was really funny, which is a cooking technique I would have never tried. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I got more. I started really experimenting more with all my cooking, which was fun. You will notice in that there are no ice cream recipes in the book because I really don’t like ice cream. Okay.

Alison:
That’s your prerogative, isn’t it?

Mimi:
Which is everyone, I didn’t even think of it until somebody said, where’s the ice cream recipes? I’m like, oh, wait, that is just a frozen custard.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Mimi:
Yeah. So, yeah.

Alison:
Your children missed out on tasting the ice cream. Probably they were a bit upset about that.

Mimi:
Well, their dad makes ice cream. Yeah.

Alison:
Okay, fair enough, fair enough. Okay, so the practical stuff. I’ve got another quote I want to read, which is on page 454, section about mayo. And you say eggs are not just eggs they vary in seasonal quality a spring egg is wetter than a late summer egg a stored egg or an older refrigerated egg is thicker and drier than a newly laid egg, an egg from a chicken fed on natural grasses is vastly different from an egg from a chicken raised on commercial pellets, a pasture chicken egg is different from battery cage chicken egg a freshly laid egg is different to work with than a commercially store-bought egg eggs from different strains of chickens probably have some minute differences and eggs from different species have some very obvious differences. I think it’s easy for us to think, oh, you know, an egg is an egg and you’re laying out, you know, the reasons why eggs are not just eggs and that plays into how we handle them in the kitchen, but also how we’re going to taste them and what we can use them in, which I just thought was fascinating to think about.

Mimi:
Well, I found old recipes, really old recipes, the talk that actually for Christmas cakes, They would call for a stored spring egg. And I was like, what’s this? I mean, there are a lot of things I ran into in old cookbooks. And I always thought that was like, it kind of set me off because it’s like, well, yeah, I would think that if I stored an egg in one of the old cooking, you know, old storage techniques of either putting it in glass, water glass, or putting it in straw and laying it, you know, laying it down from spring until winter. That, yeah, that egg would lose a lot of its characteristics. You know, the yolk would become harder. So, you know, I read as much as I could and I researched as much as I could about it and found that there were, there’s different characteristics of eggs that are fresh. And you do see the difference. You know, a chicken that’s eaten a lot of greens and bugs in the spring, you know, is a different egg than the ones that you get when they’ve, right before they go into their molting season, if you let your chickens molt. In the late fall, the last eggs that they lay are just different.

Mimi:
Now, the whole thing about chicken varieties, chicken breeds, is I did have very set breeds. I had a whole bunch of them at first, and then I would get certain eggs. Like I had the Marianas, which lay a chocolate-colored egg. And I noticed that there were differences, but then I… That goes back to my slow food stuff where I would seek out breeders of unusual old endangered farm breeds. Specifically because you can’t keep the breed alive unless you cull some of the breed and eat them. So, I mean, I love Highland beef. I think Highland beef is some of the most, I mean, they’re really cute and I feel bad about eating them. But they’re delicious and they’re kind of sweet and it’s a very different texture than from like a belted Galloway or from, I mean, there’s all these different breeds and they do have different characteristics.

Mimi:
You know, I sought out like with pork, the Mangalistas, which are a curly haired pork. I think, I don’t like it. I think it’s a little too sweet for me. But, and then, you know, there’s different sheep. You know, there’s a lot, and there’s a big variance between the full-size sheep and the half-size sheep. Like a Welsh mountain sheep is way different from one of the big, you know, Dorpers. I mean, they just have different flavors, and why wouldn’t they? They’re different genetic breeds. So with chickens…

Mimi:
You know, I think that there are differences, and maybe they’re subtle, but they’re worth it.

Alison:
I think you’re right. I mean, it’s just in today’s supermarket culture, we can easily think, oh, lamb is a lamb is a lamb, and beef is beef is beef, egg is egg is egg, because they’re all coming from, you know, battery chickens that are all the same breed. And so they all do taste the same. But actually, that’s just a complete fallacy that in the real world where farming works and is sustainable and there are different breeds as there used to be, then every single variety of that is going to have different properties and different flavors.

Mimi:
And we’ll remember our battery chickens in the United States are all the exact same breed. They’re all the white sex link. And the problem with having all one breed is that they don’t have any genetic variations. So if an illness comes, it can wipe all of them out. And, you know, it’s like, yeah, it’s the sameness. I don’t like sameness. And I haven’t shopped in a supermarket, you know, for months. A long time like almost two decades now you know I seek out yeah I seek out, I mean I do take it to extremes I mean my only.

Alison:
Exceptions I think taking to extremes is good and as far as I’m concerned I’ve been called extreme because I don’t shop at supermarkets and I go to the local farmers and I spend a huge proportion of my household income on food, you know and we don’t earn that much but I think you, when you’re extreme you you get just so more involved with your food and you you’re supporting the local community and the flavors are completely different and you’re not stuck in a supermarket with the lights and the music and, the marketing at you and life just becomes completely different life is is is real and vital rather than just some on some conveyor belt so I think extreme is good, I’m well behind that although I get.

Mimi:
Really sick of cabbage.

Alison:
In January.

Mimi:
February.

Alison:
More cabbage, more cabbage.

Mimi:
So, and I do make an exception. I do have, I do eat oranges occasionally and bananas because they don’t grow in my area. But yeah, you know, the rest of the, I mean, there’s something to be said about it. I also won’t eat fruit that’s out of season because I don’t think that’s, I don’t think we need it. I mean, I think… You know, I think that there’s a natural cycle to our four seasons. We should live within it.

Alison:
And respect it like we used to before fruit suddenly became available all the year round and doesn’t actually taste very nice when it’s not in season anyway.

Mimi:
Yeah. Yeah. Which is, it is extreme. I like, as my kids used to say, well, you just like eating the animals that you know the names of. But I like it that they live normal lives. Up here where I live, we used to have a guy who called himself the Zen Offer. And he was the guy who would go around and he would kill the animal and then butcher it. But he would massage the cows before he would give them grain and become their best friend. And I was like, you don’t have girlfriends, do you? because, I don’t trust anybody who would massage you before they killed you.

Alison:
I’ve got some really good practical things that came out of the book that I want to include here. So apart from the different types of eggs, I learned that eggs are easier to separate when they’re cold, which now I’m thinking, you know, because sometimes I can do the egg separation, but sometimes it goes wrong and it’s really annoying when it does. Um, you also taught me that whisking whites in a copper bowl is the best way to whisk egg whites. And you can use cream of tartar or lemon juice. Make sure there’s no fat in the bowl. So, you know, often my bowls have like little tiny bits of fat because I’ve been making lard or making something else in them, you know. I wanted to ask you how long you leave uncooked eggs out. How long would you leave eggs out? And when you’ve cooked those eggs and they’re hard boiled, do you leave them, would you leave them on the counter or do you put them in the fridge? How do you feel about storing eggs, both raw and cooked?

Mimi:
Well, okay, if a chicken egg is laid… Fresh laid, never been refrigerated. You don’t have to refrigerate it. I mean, people don’t for a week, you know, two weeks. I’m in America. We’re supposed to refrigerate everything. I had a deli here for a while, and, you know, they make you things that aren’t supposed to be refrigerated, like, you know.

Alison:
Okay.

Mimi:
Yeah, everything has to be refrigerated here at 40 degrees. You can leave them if they have never been refrigerated. If they’ve been refrigerated, you can’t leave them on the counter. They’ll spoil. And I’m not sure why. And I could never figure that out. As far as after you hard boil an egg, you want to get it as cold as possible. So plunging those eggs into ice water is a great idea. Then you refrigerate them because part of what separates it is that sudden jarring of cold after they’ve been in hot water. So that helps them peel. Although I like to shake the pan, so, and then you just let them sit in cold water. Crunch up the shell.

Alison:
Yeah. And then afterwards, how long would you keep harbored eggs in the fridge?

Mimi:
You know, supposedly you’re supposed to be able to for a week. I don’t like them after a day. That’s just me. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Alison:
Okay.

Mimi:
I think they get rubbery. I think they’re like old jello.

Alison:
Okay. I haven’t kept mine for a week, I don’t think, but I’ve definitely kept them more than a day. Yeah. Just because they’re so practical, you know, I can just put them in, do like eight at a time leave them in the fridge and then I’ve got dinner when I’m in a rush you know it’s just there.

Mimi:
I’m sure it’s fine I just you know I’m a texture eater so.

Alison:
Yeah anything yeah.

Mimi:
Yeah it’s probably it’s a mental deficit on my part you know there’s a lot of things I won’t eat because I don’t like the texture of them so.

Alison:
But I think that’s fine because you’re allowed to yeah you’re allowed you’re allowed to do that if you don’t like texture you’ve got you’ve got to enjoy your food and if you don’t enjoy it then then you know don’t leave your eggs in the fridge for more than a day i’m with you on that yeah okay um let’s take another break and i want to come back and talk about mayonnaise.

Alison:
Okay, so the mayonnaise section, if people are looking at the book or the PDF download, it’s on page 452. And the mayonnaise section is absolutely amazing. And again, I’ve got another quote here about mayonnaise from your book. Well, you say, mayonnaise was a popular source for pairing with a wide variety of foods, was used in many ways and had abundant variations. Much of this variety has been lost because of the ease of opening a jar. We have become so imprinted on the Hellman’s best food stand of flavor that we overlook the delight to be found in fresh homemade mayonnaise, and and I grew up with Hellman’s mayonnaise my mum never made mayonnaise and the first time I made mayonnaise I was like oh my gosh this is amazing you know it’s just it tastes fresh and alive and I, don’t know creamier and softer and just a completely different food And I think, well, what Hellman’s doing to this jar of white stuff, you know, that you buy in the supermarket? And so I loved it that, you know, you’ve got a whole section in your book that’s just completely dedicated to mayonnaise. That made me smile.

Mimi:
I was so outraged when I read some of the marketing reasons that they would give that women on their periods shouldn’t make mayonnaise because it’ll fail every time. Like I’m sure I’ve.

Alison:
Made it I’m sure I’ve.

Mimi:
Made it I know I know it’s I know so um, I like the fact that you can use other oils besides what we use here is the soybean, no, the rapeseed oil is what’s used heavily here. And I don’t like rapeseed oil, you know, which is what’s the canola. Canola, yeah. Yeah, I don’t like canola oil. I don’t think canola oil is a good oil because it’s only hexane extracted, which, you know, it’s a jet fuel, you know, and it’s like, sure, there’s some left in it.

Alison:
It’s some byproduct of some industry which we shouldn’t really be eating. Yeah. Right.

Mimi:
And the stuff grows everywhere in Canada. It’s just a weed. And that’s why it’s called canola because it’s Canadian oil. I like playing around with different oils because, you know, I like it. And I don’t think it’s in the book because I did this after the book was done. I like some of the seed oils like pumpkin seed oil.

Alison:
Oh, okay.

Mimi:
So I started using a little bit of pumpkin seed oil in it, and it just gives a whole other… It’s just a whole new, yeah, and you could play around with it and you can tailor it to your taste and to your meal. You know, food pairings is very interesting. So, yeah, I kind of went crazy on the mayonnaise chapter. It is in a different format. Yeah.

Alison:
Go on, carry on.

Mimi:
Oh, it’s a different format than the rest of the book because I just kind of list, you know, here’s how you do it and blah, here’s a million ways to do it. Yeah, exactly.

Alison:
Exactly. Because, I mean, mayonnaise is just such an amazing thing on its own, but it’s also such an amazing conduit for so many other flavours and the list, of all the different mayonnaises. I mean, you could just go look at that and then you could make mayonnaise for like six months with all the different flavours and try it with all the different foods. It’s just amazing. I wanted to talk a bit about actually making mayonnaise because I know that, we’ve had questions about that on the podcast and in our community that a lot of people struggle with mayonnaise. And the clearest thing in your book about making mayonnaise, because there’s a whole, you know, there’s whole paragraphs on making mayonnaise. You say that mayonnaise isn’t difficult to make. And you also say, you know, that Hellman’s and Best Foods are probably with their marketing responsible for making us believe that it’s a difficult thing to do. But you also say that really what we need to make mayonnaise is patience. And really the most challenging thing for you in making mayonnaise was your impatience, you know, the fact that we’re human and we’re impatient. And so I wondered if you would give some of your advice, having made all the mayonnaises, to people who are struggling to make mayonnaise.

Mimi:
Well, all emulsions are difficult. You know, there’s a lot of different sauces that are emulsions and it’s making… It’s making, in this case, eggs absorb oil. And, you know, if you try to push it too hard, it’ll break. It’ll turn clunky. It just doesn’t, it’s weird. So I had to, the way I had to do it is in the beginning, before I learned how to slow myself down and just not try to just dump things together, was I would use an eyedropper. And I would eyedrop the oil. into that I was like oh.

Alison:
My gosh that’s just perfect.

Mimi:
Because then you can’t just jog.

Alison:
Your hand by mistake or get all enthusiastic and just pour a load in.

Mimi:
Right so yeah and that’s just it it’s learning how to you just take the time to learn how to make it work and and back off when you see that it’s it’s not behaving when it’s not creamy when it starts looking funny um, but I think that, you know, I’m an impatient cook anyway, so it’s always good for me to, that’s why I don’t bake, because to me, baking is like oh, I have to measure things it’s chemical processes uh, um, You know, I think part of it is that, you can’t cook as if you’re starving. You know, you have to stop and give yourself time to imagine the flavors. And, you know, cooking is a, you know, it’s not an art.

Mimi:
It’s a soul experience. You know, you really do have to, you just have to let, it tell you instead of you tell it. You know, so, and there’s a lot of, I mean, it’s like baking bread, which I also don’t like to do. But when it comes to baking bread, it really matters what the weather is and everything. Everything changes it.

Alison:
The humidity, yeah.

Mimi:
Yeah. You know, I mean, food’s, yeah, food’s a living thing. It isn’t just a thing, you know.

Alison:
And we become, the more we become kind of part of it and touch it and feel it. And like you said, you know, the patience, it’s almost like the mayonnaise is teaching you to learn patience, you know, because really, we’ve all got to learn patience. It’s not just you and me. I’m sure that everyone else listening is like that. And mayonnaise can be a routine in which we can learn patience. You know, it can be a method for that.

Mimi:
And it’s, yeah, it also is if you’re in too much of a rush to make mayonnaise, you don’t really need it. Yeah absolutely you know you know and that’s that was the hardest part for me to learn because it’s like i’m so used to just oh i’ll just go get the jar, but when i insisted that i only make mayonnaise myself there were a lot of times i was like you know i don’t really need it to mix with tuna fish i’m fine i’ll just eat the tuna fish, um yeah and that’s, yeah that’s the joys of getting older.

Alison:
Yeah, you can slow down. So what oil do you use now for your mayonnaise usually?

Mimi:
I use olive oil for almost everything. You need a very mild olive oil because if it’s an olive oil that has too much of a bite, that comes through and I don’t like that.

Alison:
I have read that if you mix it with a machine, it becomes more bitter. Have you experienced that?

Mimi:
I only made it with my blender a few times. Okay. I don’t like it. I kind of have gotten away from most of my machines. They’re all here, but I don’t use them because I just— You’re not using them so much.

Alison:
Yeah.

Mimi:
I mean, I like—I just like touching—I’m only cooking for myself right now, so I take more time. I mean, I make elaborate meals for no apparent reason. And you can tell because I’m hardly thin.

Alison:
Um one other thing you you said you know patience and then you just said practice you know make it routine and you know the more you say no to the jar of hellman’s mayonnaise, the more that you are doing it yourself then it becomes part of your routine and it’s something you know slowly we do all these new things and the more we do them again and again they become part of who we are and then we know, we know how to do them um yeah the other thing in the um, mayonnaise section that made me laugh was that um you, you wrote that it could be used as a wood furniture polish which i have never done and now i want to know you just say wipe it on let it stand an hour then wipe it off and stains come off so i’m looking for a listener who’s got some wood with a stain on it, to try with some mayonnaise to clean it and report back and tell me if it works of.

Mimi:
Course of course i’m the person who’s also painted a stained wood with with mustard so.

Alison:
Oh wow really and.

Mimi:
I and i’ve made milk paint oh yeah I do I go off on these tangents all the.

Alison:
Time milk paint yeah but I’ve never used mustard I’ve made paint with eggs and egg yolk or egg white and I’ve made paint with casein um but I’ve never painted with mustard did it go bright yellow.

Mimi:
Um no it but it’s.

Alison:
It’s a nice.

Mimi:
I used it as a stain so what I did is I put a very thick amount on and let it sit and then wipe it off and it it was it was pretty I mean it was a nice color it wasn’t what I expected Yeah, for a while I was going, well, I was trying to age wood because I wanted to age wood. So I finally, over that, I took steel wool and I soaked it in vinegar so that the steel wool just turned into a rust. And I painted that over the wood, which makes it become aged looking. So I was playing with different things to see what I could do. And I do these things just, I don’t know why. My husband always kind of questions me.

Alison:
One day I will go into the time where I went through a phase of using onion skins and steaming them in silk so that I had a print of beautiful silk with orangey kind of russet coloured things on it. And I made it into a headband and I’ve still got the silk that I,

Alison:
the extra silk that I printed with onion skins, which is really, really beautiful. So I understand completely. I do. um before we finish Mimi, I know you’ve hinted at your enormous cookbook collection which I’m sure that lots of people listening would love to come and rifle through could you tell us like one or two of your favorite books that you have.

Mimi:
I write actually I critique old cookbooks on my I have a uh substat column that’s too many.

Alison:
Eggs it’s actually under Mimi Smith.

Mimi:
Dvorak And I critique books, and I like the goofier cookbooks. You know, some cookbooks are just awful, especially the ones done in the 40s. Just horrible. And I have one that I just love that says hygienic cover.

Alison:
Right.

Mimi:
Yeah. You know, I really like, God, I can’t think of one that I absolutely, I mean, I, I play with all of them. I mean, I, behind me are some of my cookbooks and, um, I always find it funny. My friend knows I like cookbooks, so she finds them in the UK and sends them to me. And I’m so amazed. I love finding the expressions that I’ve never heard of from old English cookbooks because it’s like, I don’t know what that is. Okay. Old American cookbooks. I have a book that is recipes, I think it was done about 1950, and it’s recipes of Department of State of the United States, Department of State. The women all wrote these recipes, and 90% of them are Jell-O recipes.

Alison:
Oh, my gosh, in 1950.

Mimi:
We went through this phase where people would get Jell-O and put walnuts in it and olives in it and shredded carrots in it. And and and we used to have jello that was you know tomato and we had beef aspic, and and people would bring these like it was really cooking and i love those i mean i have a lot of those and then there there’s the casserole period in this country where we went through casseroles everything was a casserole dreadful and um, so i kind of i like the, i like seeing the evolution of cooking yeah like.

Alison:
The narrative of culture can be seen through the probably your cookbook collection so well you know yeah.

Mimi:
And i should probably put them in order of date i like the really old cookbooks the really you know the the ones from, i think the oldest one i have is 1700s and it’s falling apart but i have a lot from the early 1800s and all of them have an entire section on how to like clean stains and how to deal with toothache and you know what to do with somebody who’s got consumption and all of them have the section on what to feed an invalid and, just perfectly dreadful. No wonder why these people died. Yeah. And, you know, it’s just like, you know, helpful hints and what you should know. And I just, I think those are the funniest things ever to read. You know, it’s old wives tips that have been lost to the ages. I like those a lot and I get a lot of delight out of them. I also find things in there that make, like we used, like there was one that was a big discussion about cooking over fire. And things you have to remember when cooking over fire. And I was like, okay. But then you have to remember that there was also the age when the gas ovens first came to be that they didn’t have regulators on them. So you had to open them and close them with regularity to keep the temperature stable.

Alison:
Gosh, okay.

Mimi:
So, you know, it’s like cooking is, you know, it’s, and of course it was always the women who cooked, you know. And then I love the old chefs, you know, who would take, you know, take 50 pounds of veal bones and bake them.

Alison:
Where am I going to get that from then? How am I going to fit that in my oven? Yeah, even like the oat recipes that I’m looking at, they’re not, some of them aren’t particularly very old in English terms. You know, they’re from 1850. And they’re using like six pounds of flour to make oat cakes. I’m thinking, how many oat cakes are you going to end up with? I’ve just got to do my tests. I have to like make the recipe like 5% or 2%. And I make all of the other ones 2% because the recipes are so big. It’s amazing.

Mimi:
My grandmother wrote, my grandmother was, a good cook. She was actually a dietician for hospitals. And she would write her recipes. And so I got really addicted to finding, going to garage sales and, you know, I believe you call them boot sales.

Mimi:
And finding old recipe books that people had written, you know, usually from World War II era. And I just did, like my grandmother’s recipe for Pfeffer News, says, take five cents of cardamom. I’m like, well, this is a math problem. But how much was five cents worth in 1940? And then how much would that be? I mean, it’s, I love recipes like that because it’s like, you know, it’s fun. And then the World War II recipes are great. All the meat substitute foods of which, you know, my grandmother made lots of, even when I was a kid, she made lots of, she used oatmeal for meatloaf you know a little teeny bit of meat and a couple eggs and then a lot of oats, yeah you know and it’s like you know I love you know I like reading these old recipes because I just think they’re goofy and fun and I’ve tried a lot of nutloafs and a lot of you know and right now I’m fascinated with um, ketchup except the other ones the ones that still that you know we used to have hundreds and hundreds of recipes for ketchup not just tomato it was like mushroom and.

Alison:
I’ve seen lots of mushroom ones and walnut ones.

Mimi:
Yeah and um there were also and all the dishes had little dabs and bits of things like little chutney and a little this and a little that, that would and it would round out the dish and i think that that’s kind of nice because it gives you a lot of because we’re omnivores so we should have a lot of little, little things. We shouldn’t eat just, you know, two things on our plate, you know, should a lot of things.

Alison:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, there’s, that’s kind of come full circle in the UK, you know, there’s heavy media on how many different plants can you eat in a day, you know, so having all those little kind of things, that’s that, isn’t it? That’s what it is.

Mimi:
And of course, most recently I’ve gotten very interested in making, sauerkraut and pickles with celery juice because evidently because evidently in celery juice it’s enough of it, anti-microbial that you don’t have to use a lot of salt you can actually almost do salt-free pickles so the.

Alison:
Natural salts in the celery.

Mimi:
Interesting yeah yeah i know it’s, I’d go crazy.

Alison:
So I can see that your explorations haven’t ended. Are you planning to write another book or not?

Mimi:
With my husband, we’re writing a family cookbook because he’s a very good cook. So we’re doing, and he also makes his own, he’s for years, he’s had a vinegar collection. He makes vinegar. So there’s a discussion of vinegar at the end of it. So that’s going to be a Dvorak family recipes. So we’re finishing that book. It’s a different style book. It’s more of an MFK Fisher, how to cook a wolf style cookbook. It’s more about the thoughts behind it. So we go deeply into like even how to use anchovies and the whole concept of umami before we called it umami. And, you know, it’s a different cookbook. And then I’m just writing my memoirs.

Alison:
Okay. Wow. So you’re writing a lot.

Mimi:
I’ve always written a lot, you know. Yeah.

Alison:
Yeah, I understand that. Me too.

Mimi:
Yeah.

Alison:
Okay. Thank you ever so much for your time, Mimi. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed talking to you.

Mimi:
Well, thank you. It was wonderful talking to you. And I’m, you know, sorry it took us so long to get together.

Alison:
Oh, no, but it’s fine. It’s fine. I will put a link to your book and where the PDF download for your book and I’ll find the sub stack and put that in our show notes as well. So people who are listening can go and find you where you are and get hold of a copy of the book and follow you. And yeah, just thank you again. Is there anything you want to add before we finish?

Mimi:
Well the website is too many eggs.com.

Alison:
Yeah and then.

Mimi:
I i believe we’re we’re carried through waterstone in the uk.

Alison:
Okay yeah.

Mimi:
So so yeah and.

Alison:
There’s usually one of those on lots of high streets so yeah that would be great most of our listeners are in the states though so um i guess you’re in multiple bookshops in the u.s are you.

Mimi:
We are. And also you can buy the book through the website. Yeah, exactly.

Alison:
You can go online and buy it and have it delivered to you.

Mimi:
Yeah.

Alison:
Which we’re all used to very much these days. Things arriving at our doorstep.

Mimi:
Yeah. And then we have to figure out what to do with the cardboard boxes.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay. I will let you go and enjoy the rest of your morning. Thank you ever so much, Mimi.

Mimi:
Great. Thank you.