Sometimes food aversions have an inciting childhood incident, such as misery or vomiting, but often there’s no traumatic history. The scent is one possible explanation: In certain preparations, eggs give off a sulfurous tang, which evokes “a bodily odor” or a “smell of digestion,” says Rachel Herz, 61, a neuroscientist at Brown University and the author of “Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship With Food” (2018). But a fresh raw egg should have no smell at all. The fundamental problem, experts propose, is the way it feels in the mouth. “It’s some combination of being an animal product and having a mucoid texture,” says Rozin. It doesn’t help that there’s irregularity between the yolk and the white — not only does each part taste and look different but they cook differently too. “The emotion of disgust is really to keep us alive,” Herz says. “One of the cues to contamination is irregular texture.”
Egg haters generally don’t hate them in every form. “I eat mayonnaise, and I can eat a souffle, if it’s not too eggy,” says Colman Andrews, 80, the egg-averse co-founder of the food magazine Saveur. (It’s their inherent moisture, he says, that he “just cannot handle.”) Cynthia Christensen, 62, the New Jersey-based cook and recipe developer behind the blog But First We Brunch, has similar misgivings — “it just can’t be a wet egg.” To the extent she can explain it, she blames her upbringing: Every morning for “at least a year” when she was around six, she says, her mother would have her suck back a raw egg straight from the shell for strength and stamina. No surprise, her older brother doesn’t eat eggs either.
Felix, the Sqirl chef, has spent the last three decades avoiding eggs, ever since her grandmother gave her a trio of pet chickens when she was 7. Seeing their bounty on the breakfast table terrified her. As a young chef at a Los Angeles Italian restaurant, she’d ask a co-worker to break the eggs into the pasta dough and mix it just enough that she wouldn’t have to feel the yolks between her fingers. Years later, the sight of a broken egg can make her physically ill.
But a breakfast sandwich is still on the menu at Sqirl, and the shakshuka is Felix’s own recipe. “Through the years, I’ve gotten better,” she says. Her goal is to make eggs so delicate and creamy they’re barely recognizable as eggs. “When I’m tasting something that I just made, I smell it, I look at it, I touch it,” she says. “Once it’s in the final form, that’s when I just put it in my mouth.” And then she spits it out.
