It’s just scrambled egg

Cheese souffle, lamb chops, scrambled egg on toast … all dishes served up in a 1970s Australian country-town home economics (cooking) class. To be fair, this was a country town smack bang in the middle of Australia’s wheat-sheep belt, so lamb chops with the compulsory three veg were on the table most nights. It was something everyone needed to know how to cook, even the boys.

Fast forward to this decade. The fare for high-school students in their cooking class in a different city was now pizza, pasta … and a new style of scrambled egg. None of that egg-on-a-plate-with-toast rubbish for these gourmet kids. Now it’s scrambled egg with smoked salmon, cottage cheese and dill, served with Italian bread.

But it’s still just scrambled egg, served with toast, on a plate.

There really is nothing new under the sun. The ‘olden days’ are now my old school days and, as you can see from a simple scrambled egg recipe, we learn the same things with a different garnish to suit the fashion of the day.

Learning new tricks with scrambled eggs: 1970s country-town style (left),
and the more modern, urban interpretation with smoked salmon and dill (right)

Scrambled egg: 35 years ago and now

• Servings: 1
• Time: 15 minutes
• Difficulty: so easy a schoolkid could do it
• Print

Ingredients

1970s style

• 2 slices of bread (it was always sliced white bread then)
• 2 eggs
• ¼ cup of milk (it still came in bottles)
• a pinch of salt

And now

• 2 slices of Italian bread
• 2 eggs
• 2 tablespoons of cottage cheese
• 2 teaspoons of finely chopped dill
• freshly cracked black pepper (to taste)
• some sliced smoked salmon

Directions

1. Pop the bread in the toaster.
2. In a bowl, beat the eggs with the milk or cottage cheese. Add salt if you are still living in the ’70s.
3. Pour the egg mixture into a moderately hot frying pan (not too hot – the egg will stick) and stir it for a couple of minutes, until it thickens and is a light creamy color. Stir in the salmon if you are living in the 21st century. Otherwise, leave it out. You couldn’t get smoked salmon in country Australia in the 1970s anyway, so no chance for confusion there.
4. Spoon the scrambled egg onto the bread and serve. You can add more salt if you’re a child of the 1970s. Otherwise, top with dill, cracked black pepper and extra salmon.

This was a response to the Weekly WordPress Writing Challenge. Life skills learnt in my chemistry PhD led me to ask what sort of cook would I be without transferable lab skills?

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