In the spirit of egg week, Lauren Burr* sent me this link, about how if you shake up your egg in a lady’s stocking before you boil it, it will come out scrambled when you peel it.
Of this egg preparation Lauren Burr says, “This seems gross and awesome all at once.”
I suppose I see where LB is coming from – gross, because why you be wanting to peel a hard-boiled egg and find a scrambled one inside? Seems unnatural. Awesome, because you just shake an egg all up in a lady’s stocking and it completely changes the laws of egg-cooking nature.
While I empathize with the gross/awesome thing, my stance on the hard-boiled-scrambled egg is thus: this seems more unnecessary than anything else.
For one, I think it is a lot easier to fork-whip an egg than to shake-weight-style jostle it. It also takes significantly less time to scramble eggs in a frying pan than to hard-boil them, so if you want scrambled eggs as your end-product, why not just scramble them I say? Much less work. Also also, every TV chef I have ever seen cook eggs insists that you must season your eggs BEFORE you cook them. Salting your scrambled eggs after they’re cooked is egg-sacrilege (sacrilegg?) apparently. So if your eggs are trapped inside their shells before you boil them, well…you cannot season them and you are therefore screwed.
Meanwhile, obviously the pre-seasoning rule does not apply to hard-boiled eggs, which are the world’s most perfect vehicle for lightly sprinkled salt. And perhaps this is personal preference only, but the interplay between a separate yolk and white in a hard-boiled egg is the highlight of the hard-boiled egg experience. Man, do I love a hard-boiled egg – oh that I had the words to properly pay them the homage they so richly deserve.
Of course, going back to LB:

Abomin-EGG-tion
However unnecessary this is, it is pretty much equal parts gross and awesome in the end.
*Hear, hear, Lauren, getting into the spirit of egg week and all! I appreciate you.