The Tenant Brought Us Eggs.

We have a new tenant in one of our apartments, a young woman from Vermont. Her folks still live up there, and after a recent visit to see them she came back to town and brought with her a gift for us, her new landlords: a half dozen eggs from her parents’ flock of chickens.

This is so unbearably adorable.

But hey, we like eggs as much as the next person, so today I hard-cooked them all and this evening I peeled two to add to the noodle salad we’ll be having for dinner. (Incidentally: we cannot make any pasta salad without saying to each other, at least once, “Good times; noodle salad,” despite the fact that none of us have seen “As Good As It Gets” in over a decade.)

I have read about how peeling fresh eggs is difficult, and how you want your eggs for hard-cooking to be on the older side of things.

I should have paid attention to the people who wrote about this, because I completely mangled these lovely eggs trying to peel them. My only consolation is that they were all going to get chopped up and thrown into a noodle salad, so it didn’t really matter how they looked. “It’s a damned good thing I’m not making devilled eggs,” I muttered to my daughter, who said, “I like devilled eggs.” “Everyone likes devilled eggs,” I said snappishly, “but that’s not the point here.”

I completed assembling the salad and stuck it in the fridge. My husband came home and I told him my story about peeling the eggs. “Eggs last a long, long time,” he said, “but they definitely lose something. A really fresh egg is a thing of beauty. The yolks are perky and bright… but old eggs…. they just….. the yolks…” He stood in the kitchen and sort of waved his hand in the air, searching for the mot juste.

“The yolks get moribund,” I said.

“YES,” he said. “Moribund. Just the word. Did you make that up?”

“The word ‘moribund’?” I asked, surprised. “No, it’s already out there.”

“Right but — in terms of yolks?”

“No, I can’t say as I can remember anyone else applying the word “moribund” to egg yolks,” I said.

A Google search for — with quotations — “moribund yolks” turns up nothing. No hits. Without quotation marks, you get a lot of hits for articles and things about chicken health issues. (No surprise there.)

Anyhow, the next time you’re seeking a description for some particularly old eggs you’re eating, there it is. Don’t say I never did anything for you.