A couple of posts back when I was extolling the virtues of J and her miraculous composting skills, I made a throw-away remark that such was the heat generated in her heaps/bins ‘. . . you could coddle an egg in there or slow cook a casserole!’ not that I had ever done either, you understand. It was, I thought, just one of those neat little concoctions that strung things along and added a bit of colour to the sentence. A throw-away remark!

So, it came as a bit of a surprise (and a twinge of guilt) when someone, whose own writing I admire greatly, came back with a comment on the post ‘. . . do you really coddle eggs in there?’ a comment that was followed up by an email about her granny’s egg coddlers. That thown-away remark had been well and truly ‘fielded in the deep’, as John Arlott used to say.

Now, I have never owned an egg coddler, the closest I have ever got to one was in the pages of ‘Antiques’ magazine in the dentist’s waiting room. Something had to be done; I know I’m full of ‘bull’ but pride doesn’t want others to think the same. I wasn’t about to try cooking a slow casserole but I could try poaching an egg without exerting too much effort and if it didn’t work I could always slink off into a dark corner somewhere and suck my thumb! The results are shown in the following photos; and no comments about ‘Photoshop’ either, if I’d used that I’d have doctored the burnt bits on the toast!