For my first attempt, I poured a thin layer of heavy cream into a nonstick skillet and brought it to a simmer over medium heat while I thoroughly beat together a few eggs and a pinch of salt. (Despite the pervasive warning that salting eggs before cooking them will lead to watery or “gray” eggs, I’ve found that salting eggs while beating them yields moister and more evenly seasoned eggs.)
I let the cream cook down until it was completely broken and caramelized before adding the eggs, stirring them until they were mostly cooked through, then finishing them with a small drizzle of fresh cream to halt their cooking. The results were not great. Adding eggs to a pan that hot caused some of the curds to set up too firmly, while the fat from the broken cream made them greasy.
I decided to skip the caramelization and see what would happen if I treated the eggs more gently. I started the same way, but, this time, once the cream was simmering, I lowered the heat, poured in my eggs and then cooked them as I typically do, stirring slowly and steadily with a silicone spatula. The results were not significantly different from scrambled eggs I’ve made by combining cream with the eggs before cooking. That is, rich, dense and delicious, but not unique.
As I was pouring the eggs into the simmering cream, though, I was reminded of Cantonese egg drop soup, an easy lunch I frequently make for my family. I drizzle beaten eggs in a thin, steady stream into barely simmering broth that has been lightly thickened with starch to the consistency of heavy cream. If you stir the eggs immediately after drizzling them, they’ll set into an unpleasant consistency that resembles curdled milk. The key to achieving velvety ribbons is to leave them alone for 10 to 15 seconds before gently stirring them.
So what would happen if I employed a similar technique using heavy cream instead of thickened broth?
It turns out that applying the egg drop soup method to Western-style scrambled eggs is not a novel idea. In 2006, the chef Daniel Patterson published a recipe for poached scrambled eggs in The New York Times Magazine, in which he drizzles beaten eggs into a pot of simmering water — just as you do for egg drop soup. Then, after they’re set, he drains them in a fine-mesh strainer, a method that bears a resemblance to an old English “buttered eggs” recipe from the 1596 edition of “The Good Huswifes Jewell.” (In it, its author, Thomas Dawson, suggests hanging cooked scrambled eggs in a clean cloth “so that the whey may void from it.”)
