In the movie Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn is sent by her father to culinary school in Paris. He sends her there for a variety of reasons, but first and foremost so she can grow up and fall out of love with one of the sons of the rich family he drives for. Sadly, my clearest memory of the movie has very little to do with Audrey Hepburn. Instead, the scene that most easily rises to my mind when I think of that movie is the chef who has been tasked with teaching, among others, a very distracted Audrey Hepburn how to break eggs. “It’s done with one hand. Kindly watch the wrist,” he says as he proceeds to demonstrate the technique with astounding perfection on an egg.
I am not completely sure why Audrey Hepburn, who deserves more attention from everyone, comes behind the chef and his egg. If I had to guess (placing myself dangerously both on the psychiatric couch and in the adjacent chair) I would say it has to do with my unresolved issues regarding eggs. After all, I have no unresolved issues with Audrey Hepburn, and the focus of my memory has always been the egg, not the chef, so I’m probably safe there.
Maybe my problem isn’t with the eggs themselves. I like eggs. Every morning I can, I make bacon and eggs. I make the bacon first, heating up the pan and collecting the sizzling bacon fat. Then I fry the eggs in the fat with salt, oregano, and dried chili pepper flakes. It is a very reliable breakfast, relaxing even, except for one step. When the bacon is ready to be lifted off the pan, and it is time to crack the eggs into the fat, my relaxing routine becomes hectic and borderline stressful. It generally doesn’t go badly. I’ve only actually broken the yoke at the same time as the shell once, and I only end up picking out pieces of eggshells once every couple of months. But it does explain my obsession with that scene. Every time something goes wrong, or even when it's simply harder than it should be, a blurry, out of focus version of that chef and his perfect egg plays out in my mind.
Over time, the details of the clip changed and it has only been after reviewing it online that I noticed the differences. In my memory, it was not just one egg broken but a line of them, pulled not from a bowl but from an egg carton. I would have sworn that the chef didn’t look at the eggs, didn’t even glance down, and only used the crack of the shell to keep perfect time as he gave his monologue. A scene of calm indifference, of perfect, practiced, precision. There is an air of performance about it– not just the eggs, the bowls and the carton displayed in a line, but in the words as well. It is not hard to imagine that the speech about the egg is as polished as the action. Repeated for each new class of those, like me, ignorant of the exact wrist movement. There have been a few times, after screwing up, when I tried to mimic that movement above the stove. But it is all for nothing and the shells still break at angles, bending in the most inconvenient of ways.
Audrey Hepburn, whether she learns anything or not, is never again asked to break eggs with one hand; she seems to be able to forget the egg, the wrist movement, and the chef with very little concern. I have not been so lucky. I have no plans to go to culinary school and no desire to cook professionally. When I crack eggs it is for me and, at times, for those immediately around me. In this context, competing in my narrow kitchen with a fictional character who is supposed to have decades of professional experience is a silly, and possibly hopeless, act. But there is also no reason not to remember, each time I come up short and end up fishing a shard of egg shell out of a hot pan, that a higher level of precision is possible and within my reach; no reason not to remember to do better next time.
