Credit…Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Sophia Eleni Pappas

Who was it who first found pleasure in rolling an egg — so fragile, so ready to shatter — down a hill? The pastime appears in “The Encyclopedia of Traditional British Rural Sports,” alongside deer stalking and falconry, and goes back centuries. The pagans did it, historians tell us, in spring to celebrate the land’s rebirth after winter, and then the Christians, who saw in the egg a symbol for the stone rolled away from the tomb.

Recipe: Chawanmushi

Still they roll. In Washington every Monday after Easter, a horde of children descends on the White House, armed with long-handled spoons to send eggs — reportedly 30,000 this year — tumbling across the lawn. It is a national ritual, occasionally suspended in times of bad weather, war, scarcity and pandemic, that officially dates to 1878, when aspiring young egg-rollers, barred from the Capitol after a particularly raucous rampage, lobbied President Rutherford B. Hayes for use of his backyard.

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

A spoilsport might point out that as of last month, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average price of eggs hovered around $6.23 per dozen — close to 52 cents apiece. This humble staple, long taken for granted, is suddenly a luxury. (If it’s any comfort, in mid-19th-century gold-rush San Francisco, the population grew so quickly that local chickens couldn’t keep up, and a single egg sometimes sold for as much as a dollar, the equivalent of $41 today.)

In truth, it has always been luxurious, the fatty yolk like a ripe sun, the protein-rich white. We just took this bounty for granted. An egg has superpowers, uniting otherwise-hostile ingredients and giving chiffon cakes and soufflés their angel weight. But it is also almost a complete meal in itself, with its cache of essential amino acids, kept safe inside the armor of that mystifyingly perfect, symmetrical shell.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.