Tuesday, September 22, 2026

The 1970s recommend eating dozens of eggs a day

The Fabulous Egg Cookbook (Jeffrey Feinman, 1979) must have been very popular. When I saw five(!) copies of it at Half Price Books, I recognized the cover because we had this one when I was a kid.

This collection is initially organized by meal (though later chapters focus on specific types of egg preparations), so I thought I would organize this post by meal, too.

Everybody knows about eggs for breakfast, so the book tried to offer some less-expected dishes alongside things like scrambled eggs. We're going with Egg Pie for Breakfast.

I frequently see similar recipes in community cookbooks, but the bread is usually topped with a breakfast meat and then the custard. Since this is an egg cookbook, hard-cooked eggs are subbed in for the sausage, ham, or bacon, so you get eggs cooked in eggs.

Sandwiches can make for an easy lunch, so we will go with the Egg Sandwich Spread. I assumed this would basically be egg salad, with hard-cooked eggs, mayo, mustard, and maybe a few finely chopped veggies.

Well, it's got the hard-cooked eggs, but the recipe uses butter instead of the mayo-mustard mixture. The thought of egg salad frankly makes me gag, but I could almost see myself eating this. (Harder to turn down an excuse to eat butter than to try to choke down mayo!)

If you want more of a challenge than spreading some egg-butter on bread (or just want an eggy side to go with the eggy sandwich), you could make Western Egg Rolls.

"Western" is the important word here, as these are not your Chinese-restaurant-style egg rolls, but something resembling tiny omelets, wrapping a bacon/ ground beef/ green pepper/ cheese filling.

For dinner, we can have a meal the white-bread readers of the 1970s would consider "ethnic." If you want something simple, try Mexican Scrambled Eggs.

I like this just because there are so few recipes that ask cooks to sauté a bag of slightly-crushed tortilla chips in butter. (It's also a reminder that salsa was not nearly as big in the U.S. in 1979 as it is now! I hope a modern recipe creator would swap that in for the catsup.)

If you want something a little more complicated, there's Eggs Italian.

It sounds like a real pain to make a custard in the top of a double boiler, especially when the first step is trying to sauté the onions in the double boiler. This is also another example of throwing hard-cooked eggs into a custard for a double-dose of eggy "goodness." And then there is the whole other step of sautéing tomato slices just until they brown but not until they fall apart... and toasting the English muffins... and layering everything... This definitely seems like one of those recipes where the amount of work will not really be proportional to the impressiveness of the end result.

And finally, if you are STILL egg deficient after a full day of egg-based main dishes, we will end with a Square Pineapple Pie (a.k.a. Unbaked Pineapple Pie).

I mean, you almost made it through a day of egg-based dishes without eating any raw eggs, and we couldn't have that. You don't want to miss out on the threat of salmonella! This recipe is actually pretty similar to the Banana Split Pie I made for a long-ago Pieathalon, so my guess is that it is way too sweet. But at least the eggs are better disguised in the dessert than in all those main dishes, so you might be happy just for the change of pace.

The roller coaster of egg prices means they're not always the cheapest way to get dinner on the table now, so maybe that's why all the copies are at Half Price Books. The recipes themselves aren't necessarily much of an incentive to hang onto this book.

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