Symposium 2006 on Eggs
a report on proceedings

The 25th Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery took place from 1-3 Sept. 2006 at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, on the subject “Eggs.” 140 symposiasts, at least 25 per cent of them first time attenders, came from all over the world, including most of the countries of Western and Central Europe, North and South America, the Middle East and Australia, as well as Southeast Asia, China and Japan. This is by far the widest geographical distribution the Symposium has ever achieved, and is proof of the power of the world-wide web.

St. Catherine’s College was designed to the smallest detail and built by Danish Modernist architect Arne Jacobsen, who also landscaped the college grounds. Symposiasts unanimously found the setting sympathetic, welcoming and comfortable; and the standard of the meals, around the theme of eggs, planned by Caroline Conran and Anissa Helou, and executed by college chef Tim Kelsey and his staff, was exceptionally high. Symposiasts relished the event’s new location near the centre of Oxford, and the convenience and collegial feeling of having comfortable bedrooms, spacious meeting rooms, and an imaginatively-stocked bar all close together – which encouraged conversation and socialising. Symposiasts who had been unhappy with the previous location at Oxford Brookes found the move to St. Catz exhilarating.

The opening address on Saturday, 1 September, was given by the writer Marina Warner, who is Senior Fellow at the Erich Maria Remarque Institute, New York University for the fall semester, on leave from the University of Essex, where she is a professor of literature. Her current book is Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media, published by Oxford University Press autumn 2006. Her illustrated talk was called “A Floating Island, a Nest of Myrrh, and a Paper Bag: Hatching Old Plots” and ranged widely, starting with the Greek myth of Leda and her offspring. After Zeus ravished her in the form of a swan, Leda laid two eggs, which each contained a set of twins: Helen and Pollux were the immortal children of Zeus, but Clytemnestra and Castor were the children of Leda’s husband Tyndareus, the king of Sparta, who slept with Leda the same night. So you could say that the cause of the Trojan War was hatched from an egg. Raphael, Leonardo, Correggio, and Michelangelo were all attracted to this story, creating “erotic drolleries” of acrobatic or languid poses. Marina Warner contrasted this blissful view of egg-laying with an exploration of egg imagery and egg-like structures in Hieronymus Bosch’s (c. 1504) triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. When closed, the shutters depict a transparent sphere, and when fully open, there are egg-like objects apparent in all three panels – so that there are eggs in Eden and the realm of nature, on earth in the realm of the Church, and in Hell. Eggs are not merely symbols and emblems of origins and reproduction, but also of sustenance and continuity, and of death, punishment and rebirth.

Bee Wilson responded to this exciting talk by adding other areas of discussion on the cultural and social significance of eggs. She observed that sometimes eggs are just eggs, not symbols, but highly practical things, as shown by Pia Lim Castillo’s paper on the use of egg whites in building Phillippine monasteries, or many other excellent papers on the delicious and scientific qualities of eggs. She observed that many of this year’s best Symposium papers covered not the literary and artistic mythology of eggs, but their culinary mythology – the belief that egg cookery is the foundation of all cookery, for example (as discussed by Ken Albala, William Rubel and Rien Fertel among others), or the attempt by successive generations of French cooks to quantify exactly how many ways there are to cook an egg (mentioned by Fritz Blank), as if it were a subject which could be decided in a definitive manner, or the endless mystique of the soufflé ( as discussed by Phyllis Thompson Reid). She concluded by suggesting that there is something dishonest in some of our egg myths. Several papers brought out the inherent violence in eating eggs, such as Zona Spray Starks’s paper on Arctic fish eggs. Ursula Heinzelmann’s paper referred to the German term for poached eggs, which translates as ‘lost eggs’. In a sense, all culinary eggs are ‘lost’. We have claimed the egg as a symbol of birth; but for the egg itself, our desire to eat it can only spell death.

There followed a talk and demonstration by Prof. Hervé This, the French physical chemist of the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, Collège de France, and a director of the International Workshop on Molecular Gastronomy (that bears the name of Oxford Symposiast, the late Nicholas Kurti) of the Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture, Erice (Sicily). Prof. This defines molecular gastronomy as a field in which our knowledge of chemistry, and science in general, is used to investigate culinary experience, rather than relying on the folk wisdom that usually produces the practices followed in the kitchen. In his lecture, “Let’s Have an Egg,” Hervé This, with a whirlwind of whisking and micro-waving to demonstrate his findings, systematically categorised the chemical possibilities of the egg. He multiplied the three basic cooking categories of white, yolk, or the two blended together by simple transformations (i.e. the addition of oil, acid, heat, etc.) and then muliplied the combinations to show that eggs, in fact, have an infinite number of potential preparations. Though he stressed that what he was doing was pure – not applied – science, he assigned molecular gastronomy the role of revealing new or hitherto neglected combinations; and he hoped that these will inspire new culinary artistry on the part of chefs. Also, when these applications of science (and artistry) succeed in giving pleasure, he hoped that his researches will expand the forms through which cooking expresses love.

On Sunday morning a plenary session was addressed by Naomichi Ishige, Professor Emeritus of the National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan, who spoke on “Eggs and the Japanese.” The historical background: Japan initially received Chinese Buddhism through Korea in 6th century; in 9th century, Emperor Saga made a decree prohibiting meat consumption except fish and birds. For some time prior to c.1542, when a Portuguese ship, blown off its course to China, landed in Japan, the state policy of vegetarianism also applied to birds. Chickens were not eaten, so the only eggs in the diet were fish eggs. But post-WW II dietary changes have meant that Japan now has the largest per capita consumption of hen’s eggs in the world, and they are so cheap that 20 eggs cost about the same as a bowl of noodles. The Japanese consume a great many raw eggs as, broken over warm rice, it is a standard Japanese breakfast dish.

On Sunday afternoon Carolin Young presented the life-sized maquette of a giant 10-foot egg, proposed by Salvador Dalí in a letter to his dealer, Julien Levy. The large object was made by her, Charles Foster-Hall and a volunteer force of Symposiasts, who communally applied papier maché to it during their free time Saturday evening. Carolin’s talk was accompanied by a naughty, neo-Dada dumb show presented by Alicia Rios and Raymond Sokolov, wearing egg-inspired millinery, and demonstrating the use of three-foot egg-spoons in the manner recommended by Dalí. It is fervently hoped that Carolin will succeed in her Guinness Book of Records-sanctioned attempt to construct the world’s largest boiled egg, using the yolks and whites of the 154,000 hen’s eggs she has calculated she will need.

This report was prepared by Paul Levy with the help (and corrections) of Bee Wilson, Carolin Young, Caroline Conran, Claudia Roden, Richard Hosking and Raymond Sokolov.