Rotten Eggs

You would eat a pickled egg, yes? So the thousand-year-old egg isn’t so much different. Mostly, it’s called only a century egg and even that is pushing it a bit. This century egg, also known as the thousand year old egg, is a duck egg preserved in clay and salt, sometimes with quicklime and ash, but basically a kind of pickling preservation along the lines of kimchi. You eat kimchi, right?

T he century egg, a.k.a. the preserved egg, tastes like an old egg. Horse urine, cat pee, overwrought sauerkraut. Because raw eggs packed in salt and clay for six weeks, these alkaline substances raise the pH inside the egg, making it safe and also full of ammonia smells, which is a kind of rotten but in a good, or at least edible way.

My fridge might be going bad. I began to suspect something when I could smell the chicken through its packaging. They don’t wrap chicken in plastic just to keep it pretty on the shelves. The plastic helps prevent the chicken rotting, and, barring that, helps prevent you smell the chicken as it rots. I still cooked the chicken. I also had a raw turkey breast that was beginning to smell like flesh. I cooked that too. On the grill. It didn’t cook all the way through. I cut the raw parts off and put them in the possibly defunct fridge. And then I cooked those raw parts the next morning for breakfast.

My kids don’t say it so much—they’re more the “Not it,” “You’re it,” types but I did say and possibly sometimes still do when Erik and I are running to get today’s mail, “last one there is a rotten egg” because the mail is exciting and the eggs are always. From the minute they fall from the hootchie of the hen, also known as “the vent,” the egg begins a slow rot. The shell acts as a kind of protector, like the meat wrappers around the chicken and the turkey, but stronger and, until it’s way too late, odor free.

It doesn’t seem quite fair, when racing your friends, to be considered “rotten” just because you’re slow. Plus, how many times does the person who says, “Last one there is a rotten egg,” get a head start, making it halfway to the mailbox before the words are out of his mouth. And, what happens when the slow, non-racer, shrugs her shoulders and says, that’s fine. I’m rotten. How rotten is she? Game spoiler? Or just a wise person who knows the game itself is a bitter one.

You didn’t wear your hair up every day when you went to school. Later, it took four eggs whites whipped up in the bathroom and fingered into your hair to get it to stand straight up. You could let the edges flop over the shaven sides of your head and look like a choir boy or maybe more like a mop. In chemistry class, you sat not in the front but not in the back either. You loved balancing equations. Stoichiometry helped you sleep at night. The many carbons on this side. This many carbons on that. Thinking about the periodic table made it possible to stop thinking about the girl you kissed, really, to hard that night at the Massacre Guys show. Her mouth around the spigot at the water fountain. She wore a blue flannel and blue pants. She was everything the guys at the show were not. She wore no leather. She had no shaved parts. Her ears devoid of even a safety pin. She was either a total poser or a complete non-poser. It didn’t matter anyway because her lips open around that question mark of water and the way she answered it. Well, you had to take her sentence. She should be lucky you didn’t take more, girl at a show at the Indian Center wearing no eggs at all for protection.

Nicole Walker