The box garden by Carol Shields

Author:Carol Shields
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Families, Family, Women poets, Family Life, General, United States, Family - Fiction, Popular American Fiction, Fiction - General, Women poets - Fiction, Fiction, Domestic fiction
ISBN: 9780140251364
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1996-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

We have scrambled eggs on toast for lunch, Martin, my mother and I.

In this household, guests have never been frequent: occasionally when we were children my Aunt Liddy, my mother’s older sister who lived in the country, would come to spend a day with us. And there was a second cousin of our father, Cousin Hugo, who owned a hardware store, a large, fat man with wiry black hair and curving crusts of dirt beneath his fingernails. And once a neighbour whose wife was in the hospital with pneumonia had been invited for Sunday lunch, an extraordinary gesture which remained for years in my mother’s mind as the “time we put ourselves out to help Mr. Eggleston.” Always on these occasions when guests were present she would serve scrambled eggs on toast.

Doubtless she considered it a dish both light and elegant. She may have read somewhere that it was the Queen Mother’s favourite luncheon dish (she is always reading about the Royal Family). Certainly she is convinced of the superiority of her own scrambled eggs and the manner in which she arranges the triangles of toast (side by side like the sails of a tiny boat), for she always compares, at length, the correctness of her method with the slipshod scrambled eggs she has encountered elsewhere.

“Liddy doesn’t put enough milk in hers and I always tell her that makes them rubbery. If you want nice, soft scrambled eggs you have to add a tablespoon of milk for every egg, just a tablespoon, no more, no less. And use an egg beater, not a fork the way most people do. Most people just don’t want to bother getting out an egg beater, they’re too lazy to wash something extra. They think, who’ll notice anyway, what’s the difference, but an egg beater makes all the difference, all the difference in the world. Otherwise the yolk and white don’t mix the way they should. Liddy always leaves big hunks of white in her scrambled eggs. And she doesn’t cut the crusts off her toast. She thinks it’s hoity-toity and a waste of bread, but I always save the crusts and dry them in the oven to make bread crumbs out of them afterwards so there’s no waste, not a bit; you know I never waste good food; you’ll have to admit I never waste anything. Most people won’t bother, they won’t go to the trouble; they’re too lazy; they don’t know any better. And I always add the salt before cooking, that makes them hold their shape, not get hard like Liddy’s but just, you know, firm. But not pepper, never pepper, never add pepper when you’re cooking, let people add their own pepper at the table if that’s what they want. Me, I never liked spicy food like what the Italians and French like. And Greeks. Garlic and onions and grease, and I don’t know what, just reeking of it on the subway these days, reeking of it; I don’t dare turn my head sideways when I go downtown.

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