The harder, the better: Why Indians have a distaste for soft-boiled eggs
soft-boiled egg, the ball is raised to the other end of the rod and released. It hits the mould with a force of 0.6867 Newtons, just enough to crack the eggshell so the top comes off cleanly and the contents can be dug out and eaten.
Germans aren’t alone in their love for soft-boiled eggs; Singapore’s kopitiam (coffee-shop) style eggs are served with a dash of soy sauce and pepper. France has many recipes structured around oeufs mollets, most notably one which suspends them in savoury jelly. Scotch eggs envelop them with minced meat. Japanese ramen includes a soft-boiled egg whose creaminess subtly helps enrich the broth.
Indians eat eggs scrambled with onions, tomatoes and coriander, or stir-fried with kheema. We hard boil and cook them in curries. We make them into omelettes, stuff them into rolls, or dunk them in gravy. We fry and serve them with cheese and chillies on toast in the newly-popular Eggs Kejriwal. We make bizarre variations (fried with Fanta!) that are condemned or celebrated on social media. What we don’t like is to just soft-boil them.
The British made soft-boiled eggs in India since they were seen as nutritious for children. They were served in egg cups with toast strips, called soldiers, to dunk in the runny yolk. They lingered in the army and in some families, like upper-class Parsis, but this tradition has also faded. It has been years since I’ve seen an egg-cup in use.
In 'Eat Not This Flesh' (1994), Frederick J Simoons’s study of food taboos, he notes that “though raw eggs are offered to
