August 25, 2010 
I can’t imagine a world without eggs. I have such happy memories of three eggs:
The first was a brown egg in an egg cup. The top had been removed and inside was a miniature souffle.
The second egg was not an egg at all but was also nestled into an egg cup.
The chef had molded an outer part of white vanilla ice cream and inside, “the yoke” was a passion fruit sorbet.
The third egg was also a pretend one. It was a “fried” egg in which the white was formed from white chocolate and “yolk” was an apricot mousse.
I can foresee the time when someone who throws an egg at a politician will be arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon
There is a precedent for everything. There was another time, long ago when eating an omelet became a death sentence. It happened in France, during the Revolution when the former President of the Consitutent Assembly was on the run. Gripped by pangs of hunger, exhausted and scared, he threw caution to the wind and decided to stop at an inn for a meal. Unwisely he asked the cook to make him a 12-egg omelet. Times were bad then all over France, so it took no great genius to realize that this was the fugitive president. The cooks betrayed him and the mob hanged him. Hence the dilhemma; you are hanged if you do and hand you are hanged if you don’t — eat eggs, that is.
As for eggy food jobs, how about these:
Barbara Dale-Avant, an employee of Atlantic Food Inc.’s cooked-egg division, in Hemingway, South Carolina, holds the record for number of hard-boiled eggs peeled per minute. Her best total was 48, which means that she dawdled away exactly 1 1/4 seconds on each egg. And her boss, Wilbur Ivey, is not a man to tolerate bits of shell among the eggs, which are shipped to East Coast restaurants. To get these perfect results, he is willing to allow 3 seconds per egg, but that’s only when peelers are first starting to peel on the job.
“A real clumsy person couldn’t do this,” remarked one of Avant’s peelers, somewhat unnecessarily. Another confided that the members of the six-woman team (who together once peeled 10,000 eggs in an eight-hour shift,) sometimes throw eggs at each other, recreationally, although Mr. Ivey does not entirely approve. On the other hand, he is clearly no spoilsport, as he is credited with devising the initiation rite for new egg-peeler: he slips a raw egg into a recruit’s first batch.
Howard Hillman made omelettes. He made omelettes at conventions, at parties, and wherever two or three or many more people were gathered together all over the country. There was a time when Howard Hillman was making omelettes everywhere you went. He made tomato and cheese omelettes, mushroom omelettes, banana and nut omelettes, omelettes of every kind, large and small, with or without crowd participation. Howard Hillman became the Omelette Emperor of the Western Hemisphere. He had a skill that many others possess. The difference between Howard Hillman and everyone else is that he took his talent and marketed the dickens out of his talent.
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