I agree with John that the question "Which food has the best sear?" gives an incorrect answer.

Does anyone know what surface temperature in a frying pan would equate to the 'mercury ball' stage?

Oh dear! It seems the differences between an omelet and l'omelette consist in more than their spelling. An omelet, we see, is scrambled egg that has been allowed to set slightly on the pan so it can be rolled up and served neatly alongside a salad rather than poured onto hot buttered toast. The perfect omelette is a different beast altogether: barely stirred, hot, speckled golden, firm on the outside yet soft and unctuous in the centre, and folded just in half...

But then as Elizabeth David wrote: "As everybody knows, there is only one infallible recipe for the perfect omelette: your own. Reasonably enough; a successful dish is often achieved by quite different methods from those advocated in cookery books or by the professional chefs, but over this question of omelette making professional and amateur cooks alike are particularly unyielding. Argument has never been known to convert anybody to a different method, so if you have your own, stick to it and let others go their cranky ways, stubborn and ignorant to the end."

"With so many ways to cook eggs there is really no wrong way to do it."

Indeed. I happily use both methods - depending on my mood and whether I want to eat the egg hot or cold. For a standard hot boiled egg for breakfast - eaten out of the shell - I put the egg in cold, bring to the boil, then turn off heat and time: 3 min for soft/runny, 4 min for medium, etc.

For cold 'hard' boiled eggs I find the alternative method more reliable: 'soft' boiled eggs seem easier to peel when cooked this way. My timings tend to be lower than yours as we don't keep eggs in the refrigerator, but in a cool larder. (And anyway they don't last long enough to go off!)

A great lesson: thank you, but perhaps the question in your quiz about bloodspots is a bit ambiguous - unless one is familiar with Boolean logic. There are two statements in the stem: one asserts that blood spots are due to a ruptured blood vessel during egg formation (true), the other that they shouldn't be eaten (false). Thus the correct answer to the whole question is 'false': an answer 'true' would require both statements to be true. As it happens, the lesson did not say whether or not it is OK to eat them (I reckon it's fine), but just that 'you can remove them if you like', so perhaps the second statement is unnecessary.?

Excellent tutorial. Thank you.

There is sometimes some terminological confusion between whole meal and whole wheat (at least in the UK). Wholemeal flour is only 'wholemeal' if it is the product of grinding the whole grain. Whole wheat flour is a lesser product, and according to Wikipedia "In Canada, it is legal to advertise any food product as "whole wheat" with up to 70% of the germ removed."

Crème Brûlée is more a classic English pudding than a classic French dessert. Jane Grigson describes it as the 'best of all English puddings' and discusses its origins in her 'English Food'.

It is most frequently associated with Oxford and Cambridge College dinners. Indeed its origin is usually accredited to Trinity College, Cambridge, although Jane Grigson provodes evidence for an origin in the eighteenth century (it appears in Elizabeth Raffald's "The Experienced English Housekeeper".

To be fair, there were earlier sightings in France. Helen Saberi, writing in Alan Davidson's Penguin/Oxford Companion to Food mentions its appearance in a seventeenth century French cooking treatise (Massialot: "Le Cusinier roial et bourgeois (1691) but points out that it subsequently fell into disuse in France.

I have only very rarely come across it in France, where crème caramel is much more usually found on the menu.

(Julia Child et al's claim that it is actually a Creole dish appears to be without foundation)

Dr Christopher Bunch
Oxford UK