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Eggs Around The World
Eggs are a universal food, an important part of cuisines around the globe. Every culture has its own recipes for egg dishes. Although some of these dishes have different names and often include different flavoring foods, many are similar.
We think of the omelet we eat in the U.S. today as an original French recipe, but it was first made out of eggs and honey by ancient Romans. You make this type of omelet by moving beaten eggs around in a pan until they cook into a lumpy circle. Then, after you add a filling of flavoring foods, you simply flip one side of the egg circle over the filling and your half-moon-shaped omelet is done.
Both the Italian frittata and the Spanish tortilla are even easier. For these flat, round omelets, you cook the filling foods in a pan and pour the beaten eggs over them. Then, you just let the dish cook until the eggs are almost set. To finish the top, you can cover the pan and let steam set the eggs or you can put the pan in the oven or under the broiler. You can also get fancy and flip the omelet over to cook the second side. In both ancient Persia and modern Iran, an herb-flavored omelet called coucou sabzi is made in the very same way.
Chinese egg foo yung is very much like a frittata or a tortilla. The difference is that egg foo yung comes out shaped like a patty because it’s made in the bottom of a wok, a pan shaped like a flat-bottomed funnel. In Japan, thin omelets are made in a rectangular pan and rolled up tightly. In several Asian countries, thin omelets are sometimes cut into strips before being mixed with other foods. Other Asian omelets are purposefully made with lacy holes so that the filling foods show through.
All these dishes are very much alike. They’re based on beaten eggs cooked in a pan. But, they’re flavored with different foods, making each one unique. The flavoring foods depend on tastes that have developed because of the foods that could be grown, raised or harvested in each country.
Another famous dish that shows how the foods of different lands are more alike than we may realize is a light, thin, egg-rich pancake. To the French, this pancake is a crepe. There are similar pancakes in other cuisines, including the Jewish blintz, Russian blini, Greek krep and Hungarian palascinta. The Chinese, too, use a light, thin egg pancake to wrap egg rolls and make won tons. Thin, omelet-like pancakes from Korea and Indonesia are often used as wrappers for other foods, too.
The differences between these egg dishes are simply the foods that flavor them. Otherwise, people of many different nationalities eat many of the same basic egg dishes!
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