When I heard this week would be Egg Week on The Kitchn, I closed my eyes and thought for a minute what I might write about. What immediately came to mind was an egg I enjoyed at a quaint restaurant overlooking the shores of San Sebastian.
There I was, with my wife, enjoying wine as inexpensive as water. It was our honeymoon and we were relaxed, free, and feeling an overwhelming sense of accomplishment. We placed an order for a ham sandwich in broken Spanish, then sat back looking outward towards the ocean as waited for our food to arrive.
What brought us to San Sebastian was the food. It's hailed as having the most Michelin Star restaurants per capita, and a place we'd seen on countless food and travel programs on TV. We'd already been in San Sebastian a few days and the food was all that we imagined: spectacularly fresh and available at all times, even to grandmothers and children at midnight. The whole town seemed to celebrate food, celebrate life, and we knew we had found our people.
When the sandwich we ordered at this cafe arrived it was beautiful - three slices of lightly toasted bread with pieces of ham peeking out the edges, and this sunny orange yolk floating right on top. It wasn't simply lying on top of the bread, though; the bread actually had a hole cut out of it, just the perfect size of the yolk. So perfect, my wife and I questioned for a moment how they might have done it. What came first? The hole in the bread? Or the cracked egg? I would later learn that this technique is called an "egg in a basket" but this was the first time I'd seen it.
We didn't debate the issue very long. I snapped a couple pictures (before Instagram was around) and then we sliced open the sandwich, allowing the bright yolk to flow over and down the sides of the sandwich. We took a bite and it was amazing.
San Sebastian is the type of place where you can write a whole post about an egg on a sandwich, because it's the type of place that takes the time to perfect something so mundane and it's the type of place where you take the time to enjoy it. We were far away from the hustle and bustle of our American culture, doing what sometimes seem so hard to actually do on vacation... relax. We unwound to the waves as they rhythmically crashed on the beach, felt the breeze rush past our hair at a similar cadence, and enjoyed the food, the wine, and our own company. We could have been the only people in the whole cafe, on the entire beach, or in all of San Sebastian.
This moment during an afternoon lunch set the mood for the rest of our trip: take your time, appreciate the details, savor the moment. When I all too often get caught up in the daily pressures and fast paced life I've carved for myself I close my eyes and think back to beach, the cafe, this sandwich, and that egg. Sometimes I can almost even taste it.
What's your favorite food memory? Is there a special moment that reminds you to take it easy and savor life?
Related: How To Fry an Egg the Spanish Way
(Images: Chris Perez)
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Aw, this makes me miss San Sebastian so bad. I went last year - it was so lovely. Best food memory there was eating bread, cheese, & apples on the beach, watching the surfers.
My favorite food memory: I was on a tiny island off the coast of Turkey. Somehow my friend and I had befriended the live-in caretaker of the island, who lived in a little stone cottage and chatted up the tourists as they arrived by boat. We went back the next day and he had caught mackerel that morning, which he fried up for us for lunch. It was the freshest fish I'd ever eaten, and cooked perfectly -- crispy on the outside and tender on the inside. With the sun shining on the Mediterranean, sitting under the shade of an olive tree eating the best fish ever, and no tourists that day except for us, it was absolutely divine.
Eggs in a basket... my favorite breakfast food growing up (aside from toast with nutella and chocolate sprinkles - thanks mom... nothing like chocolate in the morning!)
This was a lovely post, and just reinforces my debilitating need to get myself to Spain as soon as possible!
Eggs in that region - I have a distinct memory from Agadir Morocco, an Atlantic costal town, French restaurant, eggs in mayonaise... perfectly cooked boiled eggs, quartered and smothered in freshly made mayonaise. All at room temperature - no costal temperature. This was heaven! Eggs smothered in mayonaise? Well, I say heavenly because there should have been some guilt associated with such a dish but I managed to enjoy it anyway and forget about the lipid consequences.
what a beautiful story and memory, Chris! more like this.
My favorite food moment is associated with arancini or rice balls and specifically having them in Calabria (at the sea in Bagnara Calabra). There's something about spending a few hours in the water and working up an appetite and thereafter having a cold beer and a hot rice balls with melted cheese, peas, ground beef, etc.