Quail Eggs, Part One

Week: 12
Ingredient: Quail Eggs
From: Great Wall Supermarket, Falls Church, VA
Recipe: Lowell Eggs

As I considered what to do with this week’s ingredient, I thought about all my favorite ways to eat eggs. Of course, eggs are important components in many things—cakes, custards, meatballs, and on and on. But I was thinking about dishes where the egg is the star. It is hard to imagine a place where eggs are more of a star than in their traditional place on an American breakfast plate.

When it comes to your basic breakfast eggs, I typically opt for scrambled. When I was growing up, the rest of my family seemed to prefer fried eggs to scrambled eggs. But not me. In fact, I think I even went through a phase where I did not like fried eggs at all. It was something about the yolk—I didn’t like it firm, I didn’t like it runny, and I didn’t like it anywhere in between either. Fortunately, I grew out of that, but my preference is still for scrambled eggs.

To cook quail eggs for the first time, scrambling just seemed wrong. I did not want to lose the integrity of the egg’s structure; white and yolk should remain separate. So, I decided it would have to be fried eggs. But not just any fried eggs—Lowell Eggs.

Lowell Eggs?

I have many fond memories of trips to North Carolina as a kid. Some of my family lived there, and we would visit from time to time. There was always plenty of good food to eat (especially the barbecue from Parker’s), but one of my most vivid food memories is watching my Great Uncle Lowell cook eggs. He did not cook eggs the way Mom did, and it made an impression on my brother and me. We dubbed them Lowell Eggs, and here is the recipe ...

Lowell Eggs

Ingredients

• Sausage, not low-fat
• Eggs

Preparation

1. Fry the sausage.
2. Remove the sausage from the pan.
3. Fry the eggs in the sausage fat left in the pan.
4. Serve with salt and pepper.

That’s it. I absolutely cannot imagine a better fried egg, so that is the way I decided to fry my quail eggs. For authenticity, it would have been nice to use some of the big, fat, spicy, delicious sausage links we often get in North Carolina. However, there was no time for a road trip, so I settled for some local-ish (made in Virginia) bulk sausage I found at Kroger (which was quite good). As the sausage fried, it filled my house with an oh-so-enticing aroma (which was not-so-enticing when it lingered in my house the next day). The tiny quail eggs cooked very quickly in the hot fat, and took on the savory flavor of the sausage. Classic Lowell Eggs ... in miniature!

Conclusion: The quail variation of Lowell Eggs was delicious, but other than the tiny size, I could not discern much difference from the standard chicken egg version. Maybe that can be blamed on the wonderful sausagey flavor, or perhaps a side-by-side taste test would have made flavor differences more obvious. A slight disadvantage of quail eggs is that you have to cook so many, but the speed at which they cook pretty much makes up for that. In the end, quail eggs have the advantage of being absolutely adorable, and that is enough reason for me to use them again.