Go for the gold: These Are the Eggs You Are Looking For

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David Malosh for The New York Times. Food stylist: Sue Li. Prop stylist: Sophia Pappas.

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

These Are the Eggs You Are Looking For

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Dorie Greenspan has a lovely column in The New York Times Magazine this week devoted to the pleasures of oeuf mayonnaise (above), a classic appetizer of peeled boiled eggs under satiny mayonnaise that is so revered in France that there is a society there to protect its sanctity: the Association de sauvegarde de l’oeuf mayonnaise. “Le temps passe, les oeufs durent,” reads the tagline on their website. “Time passes, the eggs last.”

It’s a simple dish to make — seven-minute eggs draped in a mayonnaise sparkling with lemon juice and white wine vinegar and seasoned with salt and mustard — but you must attend carefully to the mayonnaise in order to have it loose enough to ribbon over the eggs. A few drizzles of hot water or more lemon juice will do it. Serve it plain or with fillets of anchovy or strips of red pepper, snipped chives, fried capers, as you like.

I like chicken in mustard sauce to follow, with rice and a crisp green salad.

You might prefer chile-oil noodles with cilantro tonight, though, or a simple pasta with brown butter and Parmesan. Monday nights can be great for a kale and quinoa salad with tofu and miso, but if that’s too much prep work, there’s always kimchi grilled cheese or a fried egg quesadilla.

How about cauliflower ceviche with avocado, seaweed and soy sauce? Or this crème fraîche pasta with peas and scallions?

Definitely you’ll want to consider this abdoogh khiar, a delightful chilled Persian soup that combines buttermilk and yogurt with a riot of crunch from cucumbers, walnuts and lavash, some sweet raisins and an herbal punch of dill, chives and mint.

And casting our eyes toward the future, you might cook extra eggs when you make the ouefs mayo, so that you can put together an egg-salad sandwich for lunch tomorrow: either this yolk-heavy version from Eli Zabar or this Los Angeles classic from Konbi in Echo Park. (Or go off book and make your own: mayonnaise, more Dijon than you’d usually use, a lot of tarragon, salt and pepper.)

There are thousands and thousands of other recipes to cook this week awaiting you on New York Times Cooking, though you need a subscription to access them. If you don’t have one yet, I hope you will think about subscribing today. Your subscription is important. It supports our work.

(Speaking of subscriptions, here’s a free one: New York Times Cooking’s YouTube channel. Come get to know us. Here’s Eric Kim making roast chicken with fish-sauce butter. Here’s Vaughn Vreeland cooking himself a solo BBQ.)

Meantime, we’ll be standing by to help if anything goes wrong along the way, either with your cooking or our technology. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you, I promise. If not, yell at me: foodeditor@nytimes.com.

Now, it’s off the subject of skillets and pizza peels, but I think you’ll find our “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Symphonies” worth your time, even if your musical taste runs more to Bad Brains than Tchaikovsky.

Michael Pollan has a fascinating piece in the Guardian about the invisible addiction of caffeine, well worth reading even if you’re never going to give up your morning triple shot.

You should also read Juhea Kim’s thoughtful essay about salmon, her family and survival, in Guernica.

Finally, see what you make of the Los Angeles artist Henry Taylor’s gallery show at Hauser & Wirth Southampton, which is up until August. And I’ll be back on Wednesday.