Egg Cookers
Anyone who has put eggs in a pot of water, turned on the heat, and left the room to check email or other accounts, or stepped outside to snip some dead roses, probably smelled that skunky odor of burnt eggshells. I just did that last week, and the burn went all the way through the shell and into the white of the egg. Hence, creative cooks thought of ways to boil, poach or coddle eggs and make some money in the process.
Originally early egg cookers were heated by an alcohol lamp, which apparently was thought to be a step up from dropping eggs into a pot of hot water or frying them on an iron skillet over a wood-burning stove. Interestingly, despite each of the many inventions to better cook a greaseless egg, cooks in many countries simply crack an egg and drop it into hot water.
An electric coil created an electric current to heat the water. The device, which was shut off automatically by the heat of the water, was invented by Westinghouse employee Marshall Hanks in 1936, for which he applied for a patent for his “Liquid Conductor Heater.” The amount of water used to boil, then and now, could control how long an egg “poached.”
Then came one-, two-, three- and four-hole aluminum egg poachers where water boiled beneath the divots, new electric egg cookers, silicone cups, and plastic microwave cookers.
Some egg cookers are made of simple aluminum with a tray or cups for the eggs and markers on the holder up to which you fill the pot metered by how well cooked you want the eggs. Others have a little tray with indentations in it into which you break the eggs with the tray over water that boils.