How To Poach Eggs — Because Sometimes Love Is Just Making Sure Someone Eats a Real Meal

Last week of April and Memphis is settling into that sweet spot between spring and the blast furnace that is summer in the South. The azaleas are rioting along my mail route — pink and red and white, tumbling over fences and spilling onto sidewalks like they're trying to escape their own beauty. There's a house on Barksdale Street where the old man who lives there — Mr. Harding, ninety-one, World War II veteran, still collects his own mail from the box — has azaleas that he's been tending since 1968, and they are magnificent. I told him so on Wednesday. He said, "Earl, the secret is bone meal and stubbornness." I said, "Mr. Harding, that's also the secret to BBQ." He laughed. I liked making him laugh. At ninety-one, every laugh is a victory.

Rosetta had her annual checkup this week and everything came back clean, which is what happens when you're a woman who eats vegetables voluntarily and walks three miles every morning and has the discipline of a Marine drill sergeant applied to her own health. I, on the other hand, am a man who considers kale a conspiracy against good eating and whose idea of a vegetable is the onion in my BBQ sauce. Rosetta says I'm going to outline her through spite alone. I say that's not spite, that's seasoning.

Marcus brought Angela to the house for the first time on Saturday. He'd been dating her about a month, and bringing a woman to meet your parents in Orange Mound is not a casual act — it's a declaration, whether Marcus intended it that way or not. Angela is a social worker, twenty-five, quiet the way deep water is quiet — not empty, just still. She had good manners and better questions. She asked Rosetta about nursing. She asked me about the smoker in the backyard, and when I started telling her about Uncle Clyde, she listened the way people listen when they actually care, not just when they're being polite.

I made my smoked sausage links for the visit — Uncle Clyde's recipe, the one I make from scratch: pork shoulder ground coarse, mixed with garlic, cayenne, paprika, sage, and a touch of brown sugar, stuffed into natural casings and smoked over hickory for two hours until the skins snap when you bite into them. It's a labor-intensive recipe — takes most of the day between the grinding and the stuffing and the smoking — but I wanted to feed Angela something that meant something, because in this family, food is how we say "welcome" and "we're watching" and "we hope you stay" all at once.

Angela ate two links and said they were incredible, and I could tell she meant it because she didn't perform the compliment the way some people do, loud and theatrical. She just said it, simply, the way Rosetta gives compliments when she actually gives them, and I thought: this is a woman who says what she means. Marcus, son, you might have found one.

After Angela and Marcus left, Rosetta said, "She's good for him." I said, "How do you know after one dinner?" She said, "Earl, I've been reading people for thirty-seven years. I know in five minutes." She's probably right. She usually is, though I will deny saying so if asked in open court.

Charlie called from Nashville on Sunday. My baby girl — she's twenty-three, living alone in a city where she doesn't have family, working in healthcare administration at some big hospital. She sounded fine, which is what Charlie always sounds, and I've learned that "fine" from Charlie can mean anything from genuinely fine to quietly falling apart, because she inherited my habit of keeping things locked inside. I asked if she was eating. She said yes. I asked if she was eating well. She paused. I said, "Charlie, a Kind bar is not dinner." She said, "Daddy, I'm an adult." I said, "Adults eat dinner." She promised to make something this week. I said I'd check. I will.

After I hung up with Charlie, I stood in the kitchen for a while thinking about her eating a granola bar for dinner in some apartment in Nashville, and I felt that specific helplessness a parent feels when their child is too far away to feed. So I called her back and walked her through poaching eggs — because it’s the kind of thing that sounds fancy but really just takes a pot of water, a little vinegar, and three minutes of patience. If my girl is going to eat, she’s going to eat something real, and there’s nothing more real than a perfectly poached egg with a runny yolk that makes you feel like you’ve got your life together even when you don’t.

How To Poach Eggs

Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 25 min | Total Time: 40 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

• 8 eggs
• 2 tablespoon white vinegar

Instructions

1. Keep eggs cold. Do not bring eggs to room temperature before cooking. Leave them refrigerated until you are ready to crack, strain and cook.
2. Strain the eggs. Crack one egg at a time into a mesh strainer or sieve over a bowl. Any loose egg white will leak out through the strainer into the bowl and not be used. Pour the firm white with yolk into another an individual bowl and keep chilled. Repeat for all eggs to be cooked.
3. Prepare the water. Bring a large saucepan three-quarters full of water to a boil and add two tablespoons of white vinegar. Lower to a low heat capable of producing small bubbles beading up on the pan bottom.
4. Cook each egg. Use a whisk and whisk the hot water in a circle to form a rotating vortex. Gently add one single egg to the center of the vortex and cook exactly three minutes. The vortex will help the white keep its round shape by forcing it to the center. Use a slotted spoon to remove the cooked egg after three minutes. Set the end of the slotted spoon onto a paper towel to drain excess water and slide the egg onto a plate or into a bowl. Repeat for as many eggs as you are cooking.
5. Cooking multiple eggs at once. You can cook several eggs at once without swirling the water first, but they will spread out flat and not be compact and round. If the shape doesn’t matter to you, you can speed things up by cooking them all at once. Be advised though that adding all of the eggs at once will lower the water temperature so you may need to raise the heat a bit. Also, they may take longer than three minutes. Use the slotted spoon to lift one at a time from the water and touch the cooked white to test for doneness. If it does not feel firm, place back in the water and cook longer.
6. Reheat for immediate serving. If you cooked each one individually and are serving the eggs immediately, slide them all gently back into the hot water to heat back up for 30 seconds, then again remove with a slotted spoon, dry and serve.
7. Make ahead. If serving later, cool in ice water as you cook, drain then cover and refrigerate until needed. Dip into the hot water to heat when ready to serve.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 143 | Protein: 12.6g | Fat: 9.5g | Saturated Fat: 3.1g | Carbs: 0.7g | Fiber: 0g | Sugar: 0.4g | Cholesterol: 372mg | Sodium: 142mg