Cookbook Watch: ‘How to Boil an Egg’ by Rose Carrarini

The egg is the star of Rose Carrarini’s recent cookbook “How to Boil an Egg� (Phaidon, $35), an essential ingredient in the menu items from her renowned Rose Bakery in Paris. A collection of 84 recipes includes green fried eggs, leek and curry scones, egg and watercress salad and a variety of desserts such as Eton mess and her highly coveted chocolate mousse.

Along with her French husband, the British proprietor opened the small Anglo-French restaurant on Rue des Martyrs in 2002. It became an instant hit serving simple, fresh fare made with organic ingredients for the breakfast, lunch and tea crowd. (After the 2006 publication of Carrarini’s first cookbook, “Breakfast, Lunch, Tea,� Rose Bakery expanded with shops opening in London, Tokyo, Tel Aviv and Seoul.)

The book starts off with basic tips and techniques on how to boil, fry, poach and scramble an egg then moves along to more elaborate main courses (curried cauliflower tarts and traditional Scotch eggs) and popular cakes and puddings such as classic genoise sponge cake and pavlova.

Instead of using photographs to accompany the recipes, 39 realistic, hand-drawn color illustrations were commissioned from Scottish botanical artist Fiona Strickland.

“Getting the egg yolk just right and the transparent sauces were the most challenging,� said Strickland via email of her first time working with food. She worked from photographs taken of the dishes prepared in Paris. Her illustration for the egg-in-the-middle (a.k.a. toad in the hole) is exceptionally remarkable and may have you munching on the pages.

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