There are many culinary mysteries out there, such as why oysters are delicious and why basil-infused espresso is disgusting. Actually, I do understand why basil-infused espresso is disgusting, but I don't know why oysters are delicious and I certainly don't understand the logic of the man who decided to start that whole aphrodisiac-myth about a small, raw mollusc. Some things just are. I think the big question here might be "what came first?" - the aphrodisiac myth or the delicious food? Maybe I'm bracketing again. But I am curious - if the myth came first, then who was the perv turned on by an oyster? If the delicious food came first, who was the perv turned on by an oyster?
Personally, I find chocolate, meringues and cream more of a turn-on. However, that's a turn-on as in I had a meringue with chocolate and cream and I liked it. Not the other way around. The raw produce (specifically raw egg whites) doesn't do it for me, see. I had this discussion with a chef friend who likes nitpicking, so he wanted to know if it was any kind of meringue. "Can it be, like, Oeufs à la Neige, or, say, Île Flottante?", he wanted to know. (That's snow eggs and floating islands, if you're not fluent in cookbook-french). Actually, I have to confess I didn't know there was a difference between snow eggs and floating islands. There turns out there is:
-snow eggs are poached in milk whereas floating islands are baked in a bain-marie
-snow eggs don't contain caramel whereas floating islands do
-snow eggs are poached in sweetened milk or water whereas floating islands have hazelnuts in the meringue and it's baked in a mold
-the name snow eggs refers to the shape of the meringue whereas the name floating islands refers to how the egg whites float in a puddle of crème anglaise
Well, either way, it's a meringue. So I guess, once again, the question is: what came first? The snow egg or the floating island?
(image from google.com)
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