Photo: Mark Busse

Photo: Sonson

Table manners is at a museum in Mesa, Arizona. Mesa is Spanish for table. Coincidence? Not Very Likely. The exhibit will be very hands on. Kids will learn to use chopsticks, fold napkins, etc. They’ll use the food pyramid to plan meals and create place settings.

The art on display will include metalwork, ceramic, prints, sculptures and more. Sounds like good family fun. For some reason, though, it makes me think of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Is that weird?

Photo: zzzed

Thanks to engineer & photographer Jasper Nance for her high speed image “egg drop”.

This started out as a post about Edith Poston. But the internet kept steering me toward other work people have created with and about eggs. I think Mrs. Poston would have approved.

Mrs. Poston collected eggs for more than 30 years. After her death in 2005, she left over 300 eggs to the Gaston County Museum, near her home in North Carolina. The collection includes eggs from at least three continents. 19th century Bristol glass eggs, ostrich eggs, Russian Fabergé-style eggs, porcelain, metal, and more.

On February 5th, the Gaston County Museum opened the first of three annual exhibits from the Poston egg collection. I spoke with the museum’s curator, Aimee Russell, to learn a bit more about the collection. But I found that I was even more interested in this woman who spent 30 years collecting eggs. I wish I knew more about her. And I wish she had a presence online; she’s a great example of why the internet is great. For any interest, there exists a community of interest. I feel confident that if Mrs. Poston had been online, she’d have found a lot of people that shared her interest in eggs.
Next year’s exhibit will be on the cultural significance of eggs, a subject on which Mrs. Poston lectured. (Ms. Russell is checking on possibly getting me access to the unpublished manuscript from that talk).

Thinking about eggs reminded me of other works about eggs. I thought about Eggs, the poem by Susan Wood I read in high school. Somehow I didn’t remember that it’s a really intense, turbulent poem.

I also thought about One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs, a book published by Alexander Filippini, the chef at Delmonico’s in 1892. I remember seeing this book at the Clements Library. The Schlesinger Library’s copy has been scanned, and it’s available in full text.

One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs By Alexander Filippini
For some primary source material on Delmonico’s, check out menus from the NYPL Buttolph Menu Collection.

And finally, I’d like to mention Hervé This. A mutual friend of science and mine sent a Make Magazine Blog Post on Hervé This entitled the Man Who Unboiled an Egg. I thought I had better mention him in this post too.

That’s about all the thoughts about eggs I can muster. I trust you’re appropriately grateful that I summoned the strength to forgo comments about hatching ideas, things that are eggcellent, etc.

Perhaps you will enjoy the Iron Chef Egg battle, while it’s still up on YouTube.

The exhibit chronicles three hundred years of hunger relief efforts in Central Massachusetts. It sounds like quite an experience, according to this Worcester Telegram article.
Marking the 25th anniversary of the food bank, the exhibit takes a broad look at poverty and hunger in Massachussetts through legislation, institutions and attitudes. For example, Worcester no longer auctions off the poor for indentured servitude, as was once the case. Really a cool collaborative effort and a terrific way of inspiring reflection on and participation in an ongoing problem.