It was once, however, common for cooks to spit-roast hens' eggs over a roaring fire.
David Walddon, a food historian, has unearthed a fascinating 15th-century recipe for spit-roasted eggs, as they would have been cooked in Elizabethan England.
He has written about his discovery in the spring issue of Petits Propos Culinaires, the food journal founded by the great cookery writer Elizabeth David in 1979.
In his essay, Walddon explains that the method comes from a manuscript written by the Italian chef Martino de Rossi in the 1460s and translated into English in 1598.
The basic method, though it varies from translation to translation, is this: heat a spit until very hot, pierce the eggs with the spit, roast them over the fire, and serve.
There are some helpful hints in the 1598 translation - "heat your spit very whote"; "rost them like meat" - but otherwise the egg enthusiast is left to make it up as they go along.
With Easter only a week away, and bored with boiled eggs, I thought I might put Martino's recipe to the skewer.
His instructions are brief and there is little help to be found elsewhere. The doughty Mrs Beeton in her Everyday Cookery has recipes for every sort of egg, from eggs and brandy (for invalids), to egg soup, eggs pickled in vinegar and eggs scrambled with oysters. But she says nothing about eggs on spits.
Nor does Larousse Gastronomique, the vast French cookery compendium. There are 29 pages of densely typed entries on eggs in the 1961 edition, including recipes for hard-boiled lapwing eggs, eggs boiled in veal stock and eggs deep-fat-fried and served with bacon a l'Americaine. Not a word, though, about spitted ones.
There is, however, a note on roasted eggs in Food in England, Dorothy Hartley's magisterial survey of English cooking and eating habits.
"Curiously," she writes, "eggs were not often boiled before the 16th century; they baked well in the soft ash of the wood fire."
These fire-baked eggs were rarely eaten more than one or two at a time. "The generally accepted opinion was that 'one egg is gentility, two sufficient and more excess'."
Another early source, quoted by Hartley, warns: "All eggs hard roasted be grosse meat." In other words, very filling.
But Hartley says nothing on how to successfully roast eggs - only that you shouldn't eat more than two.
For me, even one would be a good start.
After an hour of blowing on the barbecue (in the best British tradition, it has been raining most of the afternoon), there is a blazing fire.
The method given in Petits Propos Culinaires advises heating a skewer in the fire until very hot. Then, holding an egg in a gloved hand, gently but firmly wiggling the point of the skewer into the egg and carefully pushing it through to the other side.
This, hot skewer in hand, I manage to do. The next part proves more difficult.
The method states that you must seal the albumen (the white) and yolk inside the shell, stopping any leaking, by thrusting the egg straight into the fire. There, it should be rotated continuously, until it starts to vibrate.
Easier said than done.
The first of my box of a dozen eggs spewed hot albumen and yolk from either end before cracking, splitting and rolling off the spit into the kindling.
The second I dropped, splashing yolk over my feet and trouser cuffs.
The third shattered as the skewer broke the shell. The fourth cracked over the coals, where the yolk set solid.
No wonder one early translator of the Martino manuscript felt moved to add: "This is a stupid invention and an absurd game for cooks."
Then, just as I was thinking longingly of scrambled eggs on toast, the fifth egg came good. The glowing skewer went straight through and the egg neither leaked nor slid off the end of its spit.
After four minutes, the shell had turned black, and a small bead of amber yolk had formed where the skewer met the shell. While the egg wasn't vibrating, it had started whistling like a kettle on a hob.
The charred shell peeled away to reveal an egg white as soft as a toasted marshmallow and a golden-jelly yolk.
The taste was smoky, meaty and delicious. All the more so for being eaten in drizzling rain.
Four of the remaining eggs leaked, collapsed, split or were immolated on the coals. Three came out with perfectly blackened shells and went straight into waiting egg cups.
The Martino recipe recommends eating the eggs "spiced". Since pepper was an Elizabethan obsession - in 1594, 1,500 bags of pepper from the East Indies, each weighing 200lb, were consumed in London alone - I had my second egg liberally peppered.
I could not have managed a third. One egg was indeed gentility, two sufficient, three would have been excess.
A boiled egg cooked in a saucepan is certainly easier, less messy, less wasteful and far less dangerous. Do not try Martino's recipe without good, thick gloves or gauntlets and a very long skewer.
You certainly wouldn't spit-roast an egg for breakfast each morning.
But in the week before Easter, on a chilly, blustery day, it is well worth risking an explosion (or two) for one perfect roast egg, spitted over a fire and eaten with plenty of pepper, preferably from a favourite china egg cup.
Elizabethan eats
A feast day game pie
Containing a whole roe-deer, a gosling, three capons, six chickens, 10 pigeons and one young rabbit
Hedgehogs and Sea Urchins
Minced pork, spiced with ginger and mace, and formed into a ball or oblong before being cooked in a buttered pan and studded with silvered almonds to look like the quills of a hedgehog or sea urchin
Collops of Marchpane bacon
Marzipan, coloured and shaped to look like rashers of bacon
Lambswool
A blend of hot cider, spices and apples heated until the liquid forms a white "woolly" head
Eel pie
Slices of eel rolled in saffron and verjuice - the acidic extract of crab apples - baked in a pastry crust
Pears and vine leaves
Pears and vine leaves poached in cider, spiced with ginger and cloves. Served with custard and sugar
