Black eggs

At most local markets in Thailand, you will find the regular eggs as well as some pink and black ones. The pink eggs look like an Easter variety, but they certainly aren’t. And no, they are not laid by a different breed of hens. When very few Thai had access to refrigeration, the rest had to come up with different ways of preserving foods. In case of eggs, keeping them immersed in tea for a few months did the trick; the tea would preserve the eggs and also give them a slight aftertaste. Then someone came up with yet another way of preserving eggs, one that didn’t require months, just weeks: immersing them in ammonia. Yes, you are reading it correctly: ammonia. The outside of the egg turns pink, and the inside is completely black, with the yolk sort of cooked and the egg white that turned into a translucent black jelly. I did try it. Mostly, it just tasted like a normal egg. But at the end you get a slight whiff and aftertaste of ammonia. The fellow traveller who tasted it with me said that it tasted like umami, but for me it was definitely ammonia. I appreciate the history of black eggs and the benefits of this method of food preserving in the past, but let’s just say I’ll stick with my free-run eggs from the farmers’ market. 