Eggs are, I think, the Rorschach Test of food snobbery. You cannot be a food critic or food observer or food "ie" or anything other than an uneducated lummox if you do not have deeply held opinions about the proper way to cook a fucking egg. How combined? Not just combined. Not just very combined. Very, very combined. How combined is that? "(there should be no strands of egg white remaining, but be careful not to incorporate too much air)" OHHHHHH SHIT because you sure wouldn't want to end up with a Poulard Souffle! Or, let's be frank, a "fluffy omelet" or "super fluffy omelet" or "extra fluffy omelet" depending on whose search terms you're trying to monetize on Google. I've had eggs cooked badly once. I was at summer camp, and the counselors decided that cracking several dozen eggs into ammo cans, shaking them vigorously and throwing them on a roaring campfire would be delicious. They were mistaken. That we were camping next to a sulfur hot spring did not improve the situation. But other than that, foodies'n'eggs are as amusing a combo to me as the Japanese and their ice.Whisk eggs in a medium bowl until very, very well combined
At the risk of scoring myself on that Rorschach test, eggs are just a great thing to hammer on for cooking education. You find a lot of kitchen novices that would do something like throw a frozen chicken breast in a cold pan, crank the heat on high, and wonder why it comes out like rubber. You have to make an effort to get them to understand things like the starting temperature of the pan, the heat, and length of the cooking time aren't all interchangeable. Eggs are great to illustrate that because they're quick, accessible, and change a lot depending on how you tackle it. If you can get a novice to the point where they're making good french-style scrambled eggs or omelets, then they've focused on the ingredient and process enough to get that egg-whisperer sense, and that bodes well for all their future cooking endeavors.
Here's the thing, though: eggs are indeed quick, accessible and change a lot depending on how you tackle it. But unless you're an abject failure in the kitchen, what you end up with will be edible. More than that, an egg you overcook you can call "country style" while an egg you leave runny and semi-translucent you can call "continental" or "classic" or I mean fuck I once mixed Gordon Ramsay referring to fuckin' runny goddamn scrambled eggs as "the Ownly Propah Maythot of cooking EGGs!" And that's my point: the principle point of cooking eggs is not to show someone the right way to cook eggs, it's to insist that everyone else is doing it WRONG. Nobody sets out to say "here's A way to make an omelet, they all set out to say "here's THE ONLY LEGITIMATE METHOD UNDER GOD'S SCOURGING SUN to make an omelet" and it's such fucking bullshit. If you watch the whole episode of that Julia Child omelet, she goes on to tell you that if you put anything in your omelet it's not an omelet. If you let it sit you're a savage. If you do it any other way than the way she shows you, you aren't making an omelet you're making scrambled eggs. So this bullshit snobbery goes back fifty plus years - we can't blame it on the Food Network. But it definitely delineates how much of "cooking" is arguing about what isn't cooking.
Counterpoint: you don't watch Julia Child (or any cooking personality) to get "edible". Her whole shtick was this is what real French cooking is so listen up. That's the appeal. You're watching to learn how to produce a particular product. "Do it this way. Or just don't. Whatever, it's still food" just doesn't jive with the raw purpose of the thing. If we're talking at a bar and I'm railing you about your omelet technique, then yeah, that's bullshit, but of course that's how it is in cooking shows. Jacques Pépin is distinctly not that way in the above video though: here's two styles, one is not better than the other. Here's how you make each. But also, implicitly: each one is different, and if you respect the craft you can distinguish them and make each one on purpose.
French cooking is that which can be condoned in reference to any book written by Escoffier. That's all it is, nothing else. If you stray too far from one of his seminal texts than it isn't classical French cuisine. There is nothing else to it. I find Escoffier hilariously pompous and impractical. I don't have the three days it would take for me to properly make one of his recipes. I don't have the moral fortitude to correctly make sttock his way.
We could talk about "other foodies" and say anything we want, but I don't see what your seeing in the provided fodder. I'd also challenge your assumption that these elaborate rituals are valueless for the end product. You're looking for an empirical breakdown, but lots of chefs just don't work that way and don't need to. Or rather, what you call a ritual is what takes the place of empirical knowledge that enables them to make a recipe consistently well. It's not necessarily a purity of the art thing. Most people have an auntie that never measures anything but makes a consistently amazing Meat Pie or some other thing, and the only way she could convey the recipe to you is "watch and do exactly as I do". Ignoring the ritual in that case is like those morons on recipe sites that comment: "I substituted tofu for ham. Terrible recipe. One star".
That is not at all accurate. Julia Child rose to prominence as a counterpoint to the proliferation of TV dinners. WWII basically created an entire culture and an entire ecosystem of frozen and prepacked food; the rise of the supermarket coincided with the downfall of fresh ingredients and local specialists. Julia Child's "whole schtick" was that you could take ingredients and make food without having to mix carrots and jello. More than that, early food network started with Sarah Moulton, who started out as one of Julia Child's assistants. Except eggs. In foodieism, cooking with eggs is a "whatever it's still food" task. But cooking eggs is fucking fundamentalist.Counterpoint: you don't watch Julia Child (or any cooking personality) to get "edible".
I guess it depends on what foodies we're talking about. The above Jacques Pépin video is great. Two styles, basically the same ingredients, radically different results. I had seen that video years back when I was first honing my omelets, and it made me think: "shit, there's way more I can do with eggs".