Coddling may be unfashionable, but it beats poaching an egg any day

At dinner the other night, my friends and I had a heated discussion about that most vital of questions, how to poach an egg. Emma forcefully advocated the "swirl" method, which involves slipping your egg into a large pan of boiling water in which a whirlpool has been created by means of vigorous stirring. You then turn off the heat, place a lid on the pan, and put the bread in the toaster. "By the time the toast is ready and buttered, your egg will be cooked," Emma explained.

My recommendation was like Emma's, only more conservative: I place the egg in a pan of unagitated boiling water and proceed along similar lines. The downside to avoiding the inconvenience of having to swirl is that the egg is likely to emerge with bits of white trailing from it, the remedy for which is a spot of post-cooking snipping. Still, even Emma agreed that this was preferable to using an egg poacher, which results in eggs so uniform and rubbery, it's as if they were modelled in a factory. The most outrageous suggestion of the night was the "cling film" method, which, another guest revealed, had been advocated during a similar discussion at a previous dinner party. This involves breaking your egg on to a sheet of cling film, which you then scrunch into a ball and lower into your water. The prospect of ingesting bits of melted plastic along with egg, we all agreed, was distinctly unappealing.

Later that night, reflecting on the intricacies of egg poaching, it occurred to me that people could avoid a lot of bother if they ditched poaching in favour of another method - coddling. Coddled eggs were a source of delight during my childhood, but they seem to have all but disappeared. Who even owns a coddler these days? Coddled eggs have two advantages: extreme simplicity (they are practically foolproof) and the chance to mix in other ingredients. Imagine a soft-boiled egg into which has been inserted, prior to cooking, butter, salt and pepper, a little cream, and anything else you care to mention - flakes of Parmesan, little strips of ham, a spoonful of tapenade, grated truffle, a dollop of caviar. Then imagine breaking the shell of that egg once it has been cooked. That's pretty much what you get when you unscrew the lid on a coddled egg.

In fact, the only real problem with coddling is getting your hands on a coddler. Coddling has become so unfashionable that coddlers have become collectors' items, with websites devoted to cataloguing the various types. At egg-coddlers.com, you can peruse the hundreds of models in existence, get tips on "cleaning, handling and cooking", and chat with other "coddler enthusiasts" in "near-real time". The site advises that coddlers can be picked up cheaply on ebay.com. I urge you to get one, and help make arguments about egg poaching a thing of the past.

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