Ursula K. Le Guin – Soft-Boiled Eggs

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Ursula K Le Guin Egg

There are two dueling schools of thought when it comes to great cooking. One says it’s all about ingredients; the other says it just boils down to technique. But in my experience, neither is wholly correct. To be a great cook, you must have time. Time determines how beef falls off the bone, or whether a soufflé stays aloft. Time usually decides whether we cook at all: if we don’t have enough of it, we’ll skip the process altogether and get takeout.

In No Time to Spare, published shortly before her death last week, Ursula K. Le Guin reflects on all the things that compete for our limited time. Her hours are “fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading … with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen … None of this is spare time,” she writes. “I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.”

Le Guin was a master of time, especially at manipulating it. Her novels can collapse centuries into a single point, like a dying star. Her 1985 novel Always Coming Home involves a future society that closely resembles the past, with lessons for the present: three timelines in one. Perhaps her most well-known novel, The Wizard of Earthsea, switches between the future and past so often, you’re never quite sure what time it is. Reading Le Guin isn’t always easy. It’s not meant to be.

So leave it to Le Guin to take something that we rush through as quickly as possible—breakfast—and turn it into a meditation, a ritual unstuck in time. Rather than grabbing a coffee and a KIND bar, Le Guin settled in every morning for what she called “a Viennese cafe breakfast”: berries, tea, toasted English muffins (She couldn’t get “those lovely, light, crispy European rolls” in Portland) and, critically, a soft-boiled egg in the shell.

The soft-boiled egg was the crux of this breakfast ceremony. There were rules for everything from which way to position the egg in the cup (“I’m a Big-Ender”) to how to remove the circle of shell with the knife (multiple taps versus one whack). “This difference of opinion can become so passionate that a war may be fought about it,” Le Guin wrote, noting, “It makes just as much sense as most wars.” (In Gulliver’s Travels, there was, in fact, a war about soft-boiled egg etiquette, so it wouldn’t be unprecedented.)

My default egg preparation is the quick-and-easy scramble, so my husband watched, fascinated, as I performed the ceremony one morning, delicately placing Ursula’s three-and-a-half-minute egg on its own little pedestal. “Who thought breakfast could be so hard?” he laughed. But that, Le Guin says, is precisely the point. “If you crack a soft-boiled egg and dump it out into a bowl, it tastes the same but it isn’t the same. It’s too easy. It’s dull,” Le Guin writes. “The point of a soft-boiled egg is the difficulty of eating it.”

When we talk about cooking these days, the conversation is dominated by convenience: the 30-minute-meal, the to-go cup. It’s to be done as quickly as possible, so that we can all have more of that elusive “spare time.” But in cooking an egg, Le Guin shows us the beauty of difficult things: the things we do not to survive, not because we must, but because we’re challengingly, gloriously alive.

Soft-boiling is one method that really is all about the timing. Le Guin had the process down to a carefully choreographed dance: turning the three-and-a-half minute hourglass, covering the pot, heating the toaster, all at the same moment. “When the sand is through the glass, the egg comes out of the water and into the egg cup.” Then the tapping process begins, which is its own precise surgery.

I use my phone timer rather than an egg-specific hourglass, but the central ceremony is the same; the delicate balance on the cup, the cracking of the shell, the slow scooping of the spoon. If you’re going full Le Guin, don’t reach for the salt; “It is completely satisfactory in and by itself. If a little butter from the muffin gets into it, that’s fine too.”

Viennese cafe breakfast à Le Guin

1 egg
1 English muffin
berries
butter

  1. Place egg in a small saucepan and add water until just covered. Set over high heat until it reaches a rolling boil.
  2. Remove the pan from the heat and cover, 3-and-a-half minutes.
  3. Meanwhile, toast English muffin. Spread with butter.
  4. Drain saucepan and place egg in an egg cup (large end up). Using a stainless-steel knife, tap in a circle, three-quarters up the side of the egg.
  5. Remove the top shell and enjoy with a spoon, with berries and English muffin.
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55 thoughts on “Ursula K. Le Guin – Soft-Boiled Eggs”

  3. I don’t like soft boiled eggs and have never got round to reading Ursula le Guin. But everyone seems to be writing about her at the moment (I liked your post very much) and I see that I shall have to visit Le Guin and revisit soft boiled eggs.

    Reply

  5. CBC Radio’s program Writers & Company aired an interview from the 1990s with Ursula Le Guin, in which she reads one of her short stories. She was a fabulous narrator and a great interviewee and I highly recommend listening to the program either online or via podcast. I’ve never been a reader of science fiction but this interview made me fall a little in love with Ms Le Guin.

    Reply

  6. I was so glad I read No Time To Spare this fall, and remembered how rich and challenging reading Ursula LeGuin can be. I have catching up to do with some of her later work.

    And now I am craving a soft-boiled egg…

    Reply

  7. Pingback: Ursula K. Le Guin – Soft-Boiled Eggs — Paper and Salt – The Brilliant Side of a Girl

  11. Pingback: Weekend Reading: Grab Bag – The Sensitive, Bookish Type

  14. Beautiful post, lovely message. I needed this fresh air today, and the reminder that one of my literary heroes lives on immortally in her interviews, articles, and advice outside of her stories. Thank you! I may need to get some English muffins for breakfast tomorrow….

    Reply
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    Great post and im sure this person was a fantastic cook, and yes time is very important, but I have to disagree that it’s the most important. For me it’s more about the desire to cook or should I say a passion for cooking as if you have both these then the timing comes naturally or by the way something looks. When I cook I know exactly when it’s cooked to how I want it. It’s an instinct that I think comes in time, but only to those who really enjoy cooking.

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  26. Pingback: Ursula K. Le Guin – Soft-Boiled Eggs — Paper and Salt – Food Brookes

  27. Very beautifully written, it’s important to take the time out to enjoy every moment. We miss too much when we focus on the time we do and don’t have, even things like a perfectly made soft boiled egg. Plus I think I’m going to read Ursula Le Guin’s works starting today.

    Reply

  29. This is wonderfully written! The musings about time were truly insightful. I (regrettably) haven’t read any of Miss LeGuin’s work yet, but this post makes me want to relax with a good LeGuin book as soon as possible 🙂

    Reply

  31. Just discovered your blog – what a clever and fun concept! Like another commentator above, this post combines two of my favorite things – Le Guin and eggs (especially soft-boiled!). “City of Illusions” and “The Dispossessed” are, to me, examples of what a perfect story should look like. I think now I must purchase an egg cup. Thanks for this post.

    kingzoko.wordpress.com

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  36. What a lovely way to remember a great woman and phenomenal writer. Time is a construct of humanity, really. We invented clocks to watch them tick by. And with it we invented the ideas of killing it, wasting it, spending it, stretching it, in a sense, being slaves to it. We are always thinking of time, when instead we should be thinking of the moment, which is a whole different animal. The moment of breakfast, or of a kiss or of anger or of watching the rain fall down the car window – we shouldn’t measure in seconds, we should measure in meaning. We should take what is sacred and keep it sacred, and small rituals, like breakfast, are meant to be celebrated.

    Thank you for sharing this. Wonderful post!

    Reply

  44. Love the gentle unravelling of your writing. Have been meaning to read LeGuin for some time: perhaps you’ve inspired me to get around to it. Have been eating soft-boiled eggs for a while but never seem to get them right. Perhaps I will put more thought into it next time.

    Reply

  46. Pingback: Ursula K. Le Guin – Soft-Boiled Eggs — Paper and Salt – 100star

  47. will forward the link to “here” to someone I know who recently “discovered” LeGuin — and is into cooking. quite a combo, as everyone here already knows ~

    Reply

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  50. I just found you! What a wonderful idea/blog you have created! This was beautifully written and inspirational. Time is always the issue…even in retirement. I feel inclined to prepare a civilized breakfast tomorrow. Guarantee my husband will approve.

    Reply

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  55. Pingback: Soft-boiled eggs with Ursula K le Guin – eat with an artist: fact, and fiction

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