From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Alfred Hitchcock hated eggs. Whole, unbeaten ones, that is: he turned a blind eye to dishes that had egg mixed into them. It was the egg as uncanny ovoid that unnerved him. This, from the director of Psycho. ‘I am frightened of eggs,’ Hitchcock told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. ‘That white round thing without any holes.’ You’d bet good money he never went to see Cool Hand Luke, in which Paul Newman famously scarfs 50 in one sitting. Hitchcock reserved a special shudder for the ooziness of egg yolks. Blood was oozy, too, but at least it was a jolly colour. ‘Egg yolk is yellow, revolting.’
Paul Newman as Luke, attempting to eat 50 hard-boiled eggs in an hour, in Cool Hand Luke (1967), directed by Stuart Rosenberg. Photo: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images
You might think of ovophobia as an unsurprising diagnosis in someone who viewed women with such a queasy mixture of sadism, fear and longing. Still, I’m with him on whole eggs, especially when cooked, peeled and left intact. There is something worrying in their poreless opacity. It is the effect of the egg-shaped battlements on the Dalí museum in Figueres: fortification by weirdness. When Hitchcock was growing up in east London, jars of pickled eggs were a familiar sight in pubs and chip shops. To this day they remind me of specimens preserved in formaldehyde in wood-panelled zoological museums. It took me two pints of dubious scrumpy to pluck up the courage to eat one. It had been dropped into a packed of scrunched-up crisps in a pub in Somerset. It tasted like a gherkin that had been softening in a drain. I quite liked it.
The Fundació Dalí building in Figueres, with a view of its giant egg sculptures. Courtesy Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2025
Cut a pickled egg in half and scoop out some of the yolk with a teaspoon and you’ll observe how the pickling liquid can permeate all the way through to the centre. A pickled egg from the chippie, or from the supermarket shelf, will have spent at least a few weeks in the vinegar. My home experiments suggest that it takes at least a fortnight for the pickling flavour to reach the centre. Try one after a few days and it will just taste like an egg wearing a spritz of Sarson’s No. 5. This goes some way to explaining the rarity of whole eggs in dishes. They are inert, taking too long to absorb any external influence, and giving little in return. Try a dhaba-style egg curry and you’ll note how the eggs, protruding from the rich, spicy sauce like the backs of wallowing hippos, are at once adorned by and aloof from it. The pleasure is in the contrast in flavour and texture maintained by the impermeability of the eggs.
I hadn’t thought much about pickled eggs until, researching my last book, I came across tamago misozuke, a Japanese equivalent that calls for miso in place of the vinegar. They are a cinch to make. Put some peeled, boiled eggs in a freezer bag with miso, mirin and a little sugar, and leave them in the fridge for a couple of days, palping the bag once or twice. Quail’s eggs are particularly good prepared this way. In appearance, tamago misozuke bear comparison with haminados or overnight eggs, the Jewish dish of eggs cooked for hours at a low temperature with coffee grinds and onion skins. For anyone who finds cooked egg whites off-putting, note that in both haminados and miso eggs they turn an appetising dark brown. On the palate, miso eggs taste as if they had been pickled in a deeply umami, very reduced gravy. An Easter treat for the savoury-toothed.
Pickled onions, picked eggs and gherkins at Olley’s fish and chip shop, London, in 2011. Photo: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
The egg is a symbol of the Resurrection, of Christian rebirth and renewal. It is Easter in an eggshell. In a secular context, it signals the coming of warmer weather and longer daylight hours, when chickens get back to routine laying. Reading about Hitchcock’s aversion to eggs reminded me of the great Italian Easter pie, torta pasqualina. The filling is a blitzed-up mixture of chard, artichokes, herbs and ricotta that looks like a slice of pointillist flower meadow. Nestled in the filling are five or six whole boiled eggs, pushing up little hummocks in the pastry lid. A little like a vegetarian gala pie, in other words (although traditionally gala pies are made not with single whole eggs but with a long column of beaten, poached yolks encased in a pipe of poached whites.) Be warned, the recipe for torta pasqualina goes on for pages. It calls for 33 layers of pastry. You’d have to start on Good Friday to have it ready for the Easter table. Sliding a leg of lamb into the oven looks inviting by comparison – although, delicious as roast lamb may be, it can’t compete with the torta when it comes to capturing the essence of the season. Spring is ‘when life’s alive in everything’, wrote Christina Rossetti. That’s what the torta tastes like: new life. It might even have cured Hitchcock of his phobia.
Alfred Hitchcock with an egg at the Hotel Australia in 1960. Photo: Fairfax Media via Getty Images
Niki Segnit is the author of The Flavour Thesaurus and The Flavour Thesaurus: More Flavours (both Bloomsbury).
From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.