A Pure Indulgence: Scrambled Eggs With Scampi
I was brought up on scrambled eggs. After stewing fruit, scrambling eggs might well have been my first try at the stove. I still love them, despite 14,322 helpings during my childhood and adolescence.
Funny thing about scrambled eggs. The routines you learn as a fair dinkum Aussie boy are not necessarily the routines you should learn. The eggs I used to cook thirty years ago were done when they were well and truly done. Then I took some scrambled eggs at Iain Hewitson’s old joint, Fleurie, ten or so years back, and they were soft and creamy, and rich and yellow, and hardly a curd in sight.
I started looking through old cookbooks, and came across a line that said the best way to cook scrambled eggs is on the pilot light of the stove, and you whisk them for forty minutes. Oh, and you use about the same weight of butter as you do eggs. Please yourself whether the smooth and creamy texture of eggs cooked to just under 60°C is what you’re after, or alternatively the texture that comes from a well-cooked mix of yolks and whites, all scrambled up. Whatever, if you add scampi to the mess, the debate will end up having little interest for you.
50 g butter (or 200 g if you’re really crazy)
4 eggs, heavily whisked
4 scampi, shelled, deveined and chopped into bite-sized pieces
salt
black pepper
handful of chopped, fresh herbs
1
In the old days, you would melt a weight of butter equal to the eggs, and then beat the eggs gently over a low heat, until it all came together. A wonderful dish it was too. You’d have to be crazy to go down that path these days. So just melt a little butter in a pan over a low heat, add the eggs and stir gently until they just start to form curds.
2
Add the chopped scampi and cook until it just turns white – no more than a minute.
3
Remove from the heat and continue stirring, adding salt, black pepper, and all the herbs. Serve on buttered toast.
Scampi are only available frozen solid. Normally I wouldn’t have a bar of such a product, but they are frozen at sea, they lose nothing, and they remain the best shellfish it’s possible to buy.
WINE: Here you have to assign another hand in the kitchen to squeeze some fresh juice (orange, grapefruit, or whatever), while you stir away at the eggs.