In this article, you will learn how to make scrambled eggs using James Bond.
The “james bond breakfast” is a dish that has been featured in many James Bond films. It’s easy to make, and its deliciousness will have you coming back for more.
In addition to being a cold, competent secret agent, Ian Fleming’s James Bond is also a gourmand. Fleming details seventy of 007’s dinners in detail throughout the course of the book series (you can find the series’ five greatest volumes here). Bond relishes crab, caviar, and champagne, but with the same lack of affectation and appearance of indifference with which he conducts all of his activities. His culinary expertise is part of his savoir faire, or his capacity to adapt to and make the best of any circumstance. The delicious dinners he often eats in between missions are also little moments of solace for the darkness and peril of his vocation — “beautiful moments of consolation… for the darkness and danger of his profession.”
While on duty, Bond’s preferences sometimes veer toward the gourmet (might as well charge a fine dining dinner to one’s expense account if one could die tomorrow!) In his daily life, he prefers simpler cuisine such as sandwiches, steaks, and, most importantly, scrambled eggs. There are just three volumes in Fleming’s twelve-book series that do not include scrambled eggs.
“Breakfast was Bond’s favorite meal of the day,” writes Fleming in From Russia With Love, but 007 doesn’t just eat scrambled eggs for breakfast — he eats them for lunch, supper, and even a late-night snack. He typically serves the meal with buttered bread (often accompanied by marmalade) and bacon or sausage, as well as black coffee (sometimes doctored with a nip of something stronger).
While Bond’s scrambled eggs are usually made for him by others — his beloved Scottish maid and the cooks at the restaurants he frequents — he also knows how to make them himself, as evidenced by his whipping up a “vast” amount of them in the short story “The Living Daylights” and the footnote in “007 in New York,” in which Fleming, a scrambled eggs devotee, shared his creation’s recipe for the dish.
Below, we’ve included the recipe in its entirety, as well as a visual instruction to creating it, as well as our own thoughts on how 007’s eggs came out.
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‘JAMES BOND’ SCRAMBLED EGGS
For FOUR independent thinkers:
- 12 eggs (fresh)
- seasoning with salt and pepper
- 5 to 6 oz. fresh butter
In a dish, crack the eggs. With a fork, thoroughly combine the ingredients and season to taste. Melt four ounces of butter in a small copper (or heavy-bottomed pot). When the butter has melted, add the eggs and simmer over low heat, whisking constantly with a little egg whisk.
Remove the pan from the heat while the eggs are still somewhat wet, add the remainder of the butter, and whisk for another half minute, adding the finely chopped chives or fine herbs in the meanwhile. Serve with pink champagne (Taittainger) and quiet music on heated buttered bread in separate copper plates (for aesthetic only).
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Using a fork, beat a dozen eggs.
Salt & pepper to taste.
4 ounces of butter doesn’t seem like much until you weigh it on a food scale and find it’s the equivalent of a full stick. It was horrible to melt a full stick of butter to receive the eggs, but we’d gone too far to back out now!
All this butter would have killed Bond if his lethal archenemies hadn’t already done so. Butter isn’t going to kill you. I was only trying to think of a joke that your Snackwells-eating mother would have liked back in 1995.
Eggs are added to the butter pool.
The directions advise to cook on low, but there’s so much liquid that they hardly cooked after a few minutes. At that time, we turned it up to medium. It may be preferable to heat the pan to medium first, then reduce to low after adding the eggs.
As the eggs harden, keep stirring them.
Remove the pan from the heat and add… god help us all… additional butter after the eggs are just a little moister than you want them. You may add 1-2 ounces of butter, which is around 2-4 tablespoons of butter, according to the recipe. We chose the lower end of the scale and did just one ounce. If you want to make your own fat bomb, the original text includes the following postscript from Fleming’s secretary: “I believe you occasionally add cream instead of the final piece of butter.”
Finished. Herbs were called for in the dish, but the kids were against it.
By smearing each side of pieces of bread with… yes, more butter… and broiling both sides in the oven, we created a quantity of toast large enough for “four individualists.”
Served. We skipped the champagne and turned up the volume on the music, instead opting for bacon.
And how did they fare? Naturally, anything with that much butter is going to taste good. The eggs were soft, wet, and mushy, and they didn’t firm like regular scrambled eggs because of the butter. They were unquestionably wealthy, very wealthy. To be honest, they were pretty filling; you didn’t need to eat a lot to be satisfied — the French paradox and all that. Overall, the eggs were wonderful and sumptuous in comparison to normal scrambled eggs, but we won’t be eating them as often as Bond does; standard scrambled eggs with just a basic spray of Pam to cook them in enough for us. However, if you wish to try the secret agent’s unique recipe, you now have permission to do so.
“does james bond ever eat” is a question that has been asked many times. James Bond does not eat, but he does drink martinis.
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