Imagine a room of family members at a holiday gathering. This is not a lovey dovey close family. This is the awkward family that only gets together once a year, if that. They are all sitting around, with their hands in their pockets, making idle conversation about nothing in particular. There is no love in this family.
Love! If all they had was a bit of love! Let's see what happens when we add some to the mix. I think I’ll press the Storge button. One by one, the family members begin noticing each other. They get up from there well worn seats and mingle. They move about the room, and talk with all sorts of people they never really knew!
Once the warm fuzzies really set in, they take their hands out of their pockets. The love starts flowing, and one of them puts his arm around a long forgotten cousin. A little girl holds her grandfather’s hand. They all begin to enjoy to the happiness of physical contact. At this point, there is a sweetened glow of joy delicately contained within the family’s bonds.
If it ended there, all would be good. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet turned off the love. And, as we’ll now see, too much love is a bad thing. Creepy Uncle Dan thinks that he’s not getting as much love as Wacky Aunt Sue, and so he gets greedy. Little Charley, the spoiled nephew, gets selfish, and grabs more hands than he can handle. The family is now squeezing the happiness and joy out of the room! They are worse off than before any of this love stuff tried to start happening! And the damage cannot be undone! Your heart has been curdled by love!
This is how custard works. Except replace the family with egg proteins, the love with heat, the joy and happiness with a liquid. It’s all there: cold egg proteins are anti-social, tangled up within themselves. Warmed up, they begin to loosen and denature. Once they bond, through a process called coagulation, they hold the liquid in a uniform mass. Too much heat, and curdling happens. This is called syneresis. The protein bonds get too close and squeeze the liquid away.
Remember your pumpkin pie that
What have we learned? Boundaries. Boundaries are important for keeping your heart safe and your custard delicious. I’m not advocating solitude, of course. When you laugh about egg yolks, who feel so very lonely, their only desire is to fry; well I’m afraid it doesn’t make me smile. I wish that I could, but that yolk isn’t runny anymore.
Stay tuned for part two.
You, my friend, are a fantastic writer. I laughed hysterically when I read this, and I know nothing about egg yolks, runny or otherwise.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I'm glad I baked a pie with you (read: was present when said pie was baked) so it didn't suck. Crack. Whatever.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that eggs, and in particular egg yolks, are magical. Maybe even the most magical things ever.
ReplyDeleteo.m.g. so clev. and the warm fuzzy really creeped me out.
ReplyDeletebahahaha!! This was friggin' hilarious. I laughed out loud in my cubical at work when I viewed the pic of creepy uncle dan. I wonder what else came up in your image search when you were looking for him....? You're going to have to teach me how to scramble eggs now, because I know that I curdle them all the time.
ReplyDelete