May 20 2007, 09:53 PM Weights and Measures

When it is time to shop, I most often do not go to the supermarket. Instead, I head down riverward to the loose collection of markets and shops kept in a slim strip of land just north of the city. It is not the same; there is bustle, and jostle, and very often scant room on the pavement in amongst the stalls. The food is better, though; the food is astonishing. As I've become better at finding meals and parts of meals there, the number of things for which I must attend the supermarket has steadily dwindled. Those items are few now, and as of recent one less: one of the shops has started selling eggs.

The strangest thing about the eggs is that they are unclassified. It says so right on the carton. It says other things on the carton, too: free range, no antibiotics, hormone free, vegetarian diet. These are all good things to look for in eggs, but the word unclassified doesn't show up much on egg cartons, and it took me a moment to remember what that meant. Then, to open the lid to peek at a dozen eggs:

...all of different sizes.

They are wonderful, of course. The yolks are a golden yellow, and stand proud in the bottom of the bowl before the fork comes. They are rich eggs, with terrific flavor. They cause problems: when I make pasta from scratch, I have a pretty good idea how much flour should be mixed with a large egg. These are not large eggs. These are eggs with no size except the ones they happen to be, leaving me to muddle through and let my hands remember how the dough should be. It worked out fine. I wonder how this will affect baking.

It used to be like this. It used to be that one yawned, stumbled from bed to catch a toe on the washstand in the thin predawn light, hopping and limping and cursing on down to the barn to carefully fetch breakfast from underneath the hens. The hens gave no damn about sizes.

It is still strange to see a carton of different eggs. I think this tells me that I have been doing it wrong.